Dinesh D’Souza

The ‘Fascist’ Slur – Used by the Left Since Stalin

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager often notes that “Stalin labeled Trotsky a fascist, even though Trotsky and Lenin were the fathers of the Bolshevik Revolution.” Tiger Droppings discussed tis a bit:

Was listening to Dennis Prager, who is an expert in Soviet Union propaganda and speaks Russian. It was a common tactic for the Stalinists to label all their enemies Fascists, and even labeled Trotsky a fascist, who was one of the most ardent Communists in the entire Revolution. Once Trotsky was labeled a Fascist, his days were numbered.

Its interesting how similar all the tactics of the modern left are to the Communists of the early 20th century.

On a recent appearance on the Patrick Bet-David Podcast, Dennis makes the point again:

ADAPTED QUOTE FROM THE AUDIO:

As I mentioned earlier, my field of study I was one of seven students in all of Columbia University to major in what was called Communist Affairs[….] At the Russian Institute at the School of International Affairs. I learned Russian, went to communist countries every year[…] I wanted to understand the enemy… that was basically what it was [for]. I learned Russian to read Pravda and Dostoyevsky, not to be able to converse. And so I know the left very, very well and. The first use of this terminology was from Stalin. Stalin called Trotsky a fascist. Trotsky, with Lenin, founded the Bolshevik party, not Stalin. Stalin was one of the early leaders, but the founders were Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky was the head of the Red Army in the Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution.

You can’t get more Communist than Trotsky, but he became an opponent of Stalin after Lemin’s death and he fled the Soviet Union [and] fled to Mexico. Stalin sent the assassins to kill him with an ice pick, which was done in Mexico.

He called Trotsky a Fascist.

So every one of your listeners [to the PBD Podcast] needs to understand this. [….] All leftists since Stalin have done the exact same thing, they call their opponents fascists. There is no exception. That is what they do. They call them the worst possible names.

I’ll give you one other Law about the left. And that is that there is no example of the Left being in power, whether in the country or the university, and allowing dissent. There is no example, and I have my favorite example as Prime Minister Ardern, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, during the lockdowns, said this:

[Extended Quote:] We will continue to be your single source of truth. We will provide information frequently. We will share everything we can. Take everything else you see with a grain of salt. And so, I really ask people to focus.[….] remember that unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth. [This was regarding Covid and Covid lockdowns and information. Most of what the New Zealand government pushed turned out to be – in fact – wrong.]

[….] Guess where she is now? Harvard. She’s teaching at Harvard. She is a kindred spirit to Harvard, Harvard!, whose motto […] means truth. But it’s a joke. It means nothing to any Left-wing group. Truth is, what is the Soviet Communist newspaper that I learned Russian to read called? Pravda. Pravda means truth.

Truth in the Left-wing world is what they say it is. It has no objective reality. The Oregon Education Department announced the idea that math has a correct answer is, is white supremacy.

CLARITY ON THE SUBJECT:

The NATIONAL REVIEW article Dennis Prager is reading from can be found here: “Biden White House Pressured Amazon to Censor Vaccine-Skeptical Books, Internal Emails Reveal” The PRAGER U video mentioned (and the excerpt I included) can be found here: “Big Business & Big Brother”. And the other THOMAS SOWELL video is via this YouTube Channel. Must read JIM JORDAN’S Twitter thread as well.

THOMAS SOWELL QUOTE:

Question to Thomas Sowell: Talk about President Obama. Do you think he’s a socialist?

Thomas Sowell: No, not technically, I suppose, because socialism usually means the government ownership of the means of production. The pattern he’s following is much more like that of the fascist, where the government leaves the production in the private hands, and the politicians tell them what to do, and that’s much more politically viable because, after the government forces the private industry to do something and it turns out disastrously; you can always haul the people from private industry up before congressional committees, denounce them on television and so forth. Leaving out the fact that it was you who forced them to do what they did.

How biased are these pushes? Mollie Hemingway and Laura Ingraham explain:

‘The Federalist’ editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway discusses NewsGuard’s global disinformation index categorizing right-leading media outlets as ‘risky’ and left-leaning outlets as ‘least risky’ for disinformation on ‘The Ingraham Angle.’

Larry Elder reads from Thomas Sowell’s 2012 article, “Socialist Or Fascist? Government Ownership Of The Means Of Production Means That Politicians Also Own The Consequences Of Their Policies…” (HUMAN EVENTS). I go out of my way to add to the audio by inserting various videos from Jonah Goldberg, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan, Kamala Harris, etc.

MUSSOLINI QUOTE:

“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition….  If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity….  From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.”

Mussolini, Diuturna (1924) pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.

SOCIALISTS/MARXISTS BECAME FASCISTS

Here is an extended quote from Dinesh D’Souza’s book, THE BIG LIE, detailing the easy switch from socialist leaders and unions to fascist — overnight:

…on March 23, 1919, one of the most famous socialists in Italy founded a new party, the Fasci di Combattimento, a term that means “fascist combat squad.” This was the first official fascist party and thus its founding represents the true birth of fascism. By the same token, this man was the first fascist. The term “fascism” can be traced back to 1914, when he founded the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, a political movement whose members called them­selves fascisti or fascists.

In 1914, this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world. His fellow Marx­ists and socialists recognized him as a great leader of socialism. His decision to become a fascist was controversial, yet he received congratu­lations from Lenin who continued to regard him as a faithful revolution­ary socialist. And this is how he saw himself.

That same year, because of his support for Italian involvement in World War I, he would be expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for “heresy,” but this does not mean he ceased to be a socialist. It was common practice for socialist parties to expel dissenting fellow social­ists for breaking on some fine point with the party line. This party reject insisted that he had been kicked out for making “a revision of socialism from the revolutionary point of view.” For the rest of his life—right until his lifeless body was displayed in a town square in Milan—he upheld the central tenets of socialism which he saw as best reflected in fascism.

Who, then, was this man? He was the future leader of fascist Italy, the one whom Italians called Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini’s socialist credentials were impeccable. He had been raised in a socialist family and made a public declaration in 1901, at the age of eighteen, of his convictions. By twenty-one, he was an orthodox Marx­ist familiar not only with the writings of Marx and Engels but also of many of the most influential German, Italian, and French Marxists of the fin de siecle period. Like other orthodox Marxists, Mussolini rejected religious faith and authored anti-Catholic pamphlets repudiating his native Catholicism.

Mussolini embarked on an active career as a writer, editor, and political organizer. Exiled to Switzerland between 1902 and 1904, he collaborated with the Italian Socialist Party weekly issued there and also wrote for Il Proletario, a socialist weekly published in New York. In 1909 Mussolini made another foreign sojourn to Trento—then part of Austria-Hungary—where he worked for the socialist party and edited its news­paper. Returning the next year to his hometown of Forli, he edited the weekly socialist publication La Lotta di Classe (The Class War). He wrote so widely on Marxism, socialist theory, and contemporary politics that his output now fills seven volumes.

Mussolini wasn’t just an intellectual; he organized workers’ strikes on behalf of the socialist movement both inside and outside of Italy and was twice jailed for his activism. In 1912, Mussolini was recognized as a socialist leader at the Socialist Congress at Reggio Emilia and was appointed to the Italian Socialist Party’s board of directors. That same year, at the age of twenty-nine, he became editor of Avanti!, the official publication of the party.

From the point of view of the progressive narrative—a narrative I began to challenge in the previous chapter—Mussolini’s shift from Marxian socialism to fascism must come as a huge surprise. In the pro­gressive paradigm, Marxian socialism is the left end of the spectrum and fascism is the right end of the spectrum. Progressive incredulity becomes even greater when we see that Mussolini wasn’t just any socialist; he was the recognized head of the socialist movement in Italy. Moreover, he didn’t just climb aboard the fascist bandwagon; he created it.

Today we think of fascism’s most famous representative as Adolf Hitler. Yet as I mentioned earlier, Hitler didn’t consider himself a fascist. Rather, he saw himself as a National Socialist. The two ideologies are related in that they are both based on collectivism and centralized state power. They emerge, one might say, from a common point of origin. Yet they are also distinct; fascism, for instance, had no intrinsic connection with anti-Semitism in the way that National Socialism did.

In any event, Hitler was an obscure local organizer in Germany when Mussolini came to power and, following his famous March on Rome, established the world’s first fascist regime in Italy in 1922. Hitler greatly admired Mussolini and aspired to become like him. Mussolini, Hitler said, was “the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself.” Hitler modeled his failed Munich Putsch in November 1923 on Mussolini’s successful March on Rome.

When Hitler first came to power he kept a bust of Mussolini in his office and one German observer termed him “Germany’s Mussolini.” Yet later, when the two men first met, Mussolini was not very impressed by Hitler. Mussolini became more respectful after 1939 when Hitler conquered Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Norway, and France. Hitler continued to uphold Mussolini as “that unparalleled statesman” and “one of the Caesars” and confessed that without Italian fascism there would not have been a German National Socialism: “The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt.”

Hitler was, like Mussolini, a man of the Left. Hitler too was a social­ist and a labor leader who founded the German Socialist Workers’ Party with a platform very similar to that of Mussolini’s fascist party. Yet Hitler came to power in the 1930s while Mussolini ruled through most of the 1920s. Mussolini was, during those years, much more famous than Hitler. He was recognized as the founding father of fascism. So any account of the origin of fascism must focus not on Hitler but on Mus­solini. Mussolini is the original and prototypical fascist.

From Socialism to Fascism

So how—to return to the progressive paradigm—do progressives account for Mussolini’s conversion from socialism to fascism, or more precisely for Mussolini’s simultaneous embrace of both? The problem is further deepened by the fact that Mussolini was not alone. Hundreds of leading socialists, initially in Italy but subsequently in Germany, France, and other countries, also became fascists. In fact, I will go further to say that all the leading figures in the founding of fascism were men of the Left. “The first fascists,” Anthony James Gregor tells us, “were almost all Marxists.”

I will cite a few examples. Jean Allemane, famous for his role in the Dreyfus case, one of the great figures of French socialism, became a fascist later in life. So did the socialist Georges Valois. Marcel Deat, the founder of the Parti Socialiste de France, eventually quit and started a pro-fascist party in 1936. Later, he became a Nazi collaborator during the Vichy regimeVacques Doriot a French communist, moved his Parti Populaire Francais into the fascist camp.

The Belgian socialist theoretician Henri de Man transitioned to becoming a fascist theoretician. In England. Oswald Mosley, a socialist and Labor Party Member of Parliament, eventually broke with the Labor Party because he found it insufficiently radical. He later founded the British Union of Fascists and became the country’s leading Nazi sympa­thizer. In Germany, the socialist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann embraced Hitler and produced plays during the Third Reich. After the war, he became a communist and staged his productions in Soviet-dominated East Berlin

In Italy, philosopher Giovanni Gentile moved from Marxism to fas­cism, as did a host of Italian labor organizers: Ottavio Dinale, Tullio Masotti, Carlo Silvestri, and Umberto Pasella. The socialist writer Agos­tino Lanzillo joined Mussolini’s parliament as a member of the fascist party Nicola Bombacci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, became Mussolini’s top adviser in Salo. Gentile’s disciple Ugo Spirito, who also served Mussolini at Salo, moved from Marxism to fascism and then back to Marxism. Like Hauptmann, Spirito became a communist sympathizer after World War II and called for a new “syn­thesis” between communism and fascism.

Others who made the same journey from socialism to fascism will be named in this chapter, and one thing that will become very clear is that these are not “conversion” stories. These men didn’t “switch” from socialism to fascism. Rather, they became fascists in the same way that Russian socialists became Leninist Bolsheviks. Like their Russian coun­terparts, these socialists believed themselves to be growing into fascism, maturing into fascism, because they saw fascism as the most well thought out, practical form of socialism for the new century.

Progressivism simply cannot account for the easy traffic from social­ism to fascism. Consequently, progressives typically maintain complete silence about this whole historical relationship which is deeply embar­rassing to them. In all the articles comparing Trump to Mussolini I searched in vain for references to Mussolini’s erstwhile Marxism and lifelong attachment to socialism. Either from ignorance or from design, these references are missing.

Progressive biographical accounts that cannot avoid Mussolini’s socialist past nevertheless turn around and accuse Mussolini—as the Socialist Party of Italy did in 1914—of “selling out” to fascism for money and power. Other accounts contend that whatever Mussolini’s original convictions, the very fact that his fascists later battled the Marxists and traditional socialists clearly shows that Mussolini did not remain a social­ist or a man of the Left.

But these explanations make no sense. When Mussolini “sold out” he became an outcast. He had neither money nor power. Nor did any of the first fascists embrace fascism for this reason. Rather, they became fascists because they saw fascism as the only way to rescue socialism and make it viable. In other words, their defection was within socialism—they sought to create a new type of socialism that would actually draw a mass following and produce the workers’ revolution that Marx antic­ipated and hoped for.

Vicious fights among socialist and leftist factions are a recognized feature of the history of socialism. In Russia, for example, there were bloody confrontations between the rival Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Later the Bolsheviks split into Leninists and Trotskyites, and Trotsky ended up dead on Lenin’s orders. These were all men of the Left. What these bloody rivalries prove is that the worst splits and conflicts some­times arise among people who are ideologically very similar and differ on relatively small—though not small to them—points of doctrine.

In this chapter I will trace the development of fascism by showing precisely how it grew out of a doctrinal division within the community of Marxian socialists. In short, I will prove that fascism is exclusively a product of the Left. This is not a case of leftists who moved right. On the contrary, the fascists were on the left end of the socialist movement. They saw themselves not as jettisoning Marxism but as saving it from obsolescence. From their perspective, Marxism and socialism were too inert and needed to be adjusted leftward. In other words, they viewed fascism as more revolutionary than traditional socialism.

[….]

Mussolini didn’t believe in race and he wasn’t initially a nationalist; rather, he was a revolutionary syndicalist. The term syndicalism refers to the associations or syndicates to which workers belonged. These were autonomous workers organizations that resembled unions, but they were not unions because the syndicates were organized regionally rather than by corporation or occupation. As dedicated Marxists, the revolutionary syndicalists agreed with Marx that class associations were primary, and that they must be the organizing principle of socialist revolution.

Very much in keeping with this class emphasis that was so central to Marx, the syndicalists, strongly influenced by Sorel, sought to rally the labor syndicates through a general strike that would overthrow the ruling class and establish socialism in Italy. This is what made them “revolutionary.” They intended to foment revolution, not wait for it to happen. They were considered the smartest, most dedicated people in the Italian Socialist Party and they occupied the left wing of the party.

The big names in revolutionary syndicalism were Giuseppe Prezzolini, Angelo 0. Olivetti, Arturo Labriola, Filippo Corridoni, Paolo Orano, Michele Bianchi, and Sergio Panunzio. Most of them were writ­ers or labor organizers. All of them were socialists, and shortly all of them would be camelascists, even though Labriola opposed Mussolini’s regime when it came to power and Corridoni, who was killed in World War I, didn’t live to see it.

Mussolini was their acknowledged leader. He knew them well and conspired with them at meetings and rallies. He read their books and articles and published in their magazines like the Avanguardia Socialista, founded by Laboriola, which was the leading journal of syndicalist thought. Mussolini also reviewed and published the leading syndicalists in his own socialist publications.

Like all revolutionary socialists, the syndicalists had little faith in democratic parliamentary procedures and, consistent with Sorel and Lenin, they sought a charismatic leader who would inspire the workers to action. Mussolini, more than anyone else, fit their prescription. Mus­solini was the one who led the syndicalists into a union with the nation­alists in order to form the new socialist hybrid called fascism in Italy and (with some modifications) National Socialism in Germany.

The syndicalists organized three general strikes in Italy in 1904, 1911, and 1913. Mussolini supported the strikes. The 1904 strike began in Milan and spread across the country. Five million workers walked off their jobs. The nation was paralyzed: there was no public transportation, and no one could buy anything. Even so, the strike ended without caus­ing either the fall of the government or the installation of socialism.

  • Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the NAZI Roots of the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017), 65-70, 82-83.

What “Is” Fascism ~ Two Old Posts Combined

Icons of Pluralism Examined: Elephants and Geography Fallacies

Published by Papa Giorgio

ORIGINALLY POSTED FEBRUARY 2015, UPDATED TODAY (11/30/2023)

AS A QUICK ASIDE: Christianity was born/founded on the Asian Continent, and more Christians today are residing on said Continent than anyplace in the world. In fact, just in China alone, there is said to be 100-million believers or more. In other words, there have been more Christians on the Asian Continent from the churches founding to this day. Christianity has always been an “Asian religion.” Of course the West has influenced the expression of faith just as other geographical areas have influenced expression of the Christian faith. But Christianity is not “American.”

JOHN PIIPPO has this great insight from Dinesh D’Souza:

Dinesh D’Souza, in his new book Life After Death: The Evidence, talks about the genetic fallacy as used, he feels, by certain atheists. For example, it is a sociological fact that the statement religious diversity exists is true. If you were born in India, as D.Souza was, you would most likely be a Hindu rather than a Christian or a Jew (as D’Souza was). While that sociological statement is true, its truth has (watch closely…) no logical relevance as regards the statements such as The Hindu worldview is true, or Christian theism is true. D’ Souza writes:

“The atheist is simply wrong to assume that religious diversity undermines the truth of religious claims… [T]he fact that you learned your Christianity because you grew up in the Bible Belt [does not] imply anything about whether those beliefs are true or false. The atheist is guilty here of what in logic is called the “genetic fallacy.” The term does not refer to genes; it refers to origins. Think of it this way. If you are raised in New York, you are more likely to believe in Einstein’s theory of relativity than if you are raised in New Guinea. Someone from Oxford, England, is more likely to be an atheist than someone from Oxford, Mississippi. The geographical roots of your beliefs have no bearing on the validity of your beliefs.” (38-39, emphasis mine)

[Dinesh D’Souza, Life After Death: The Evidence (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2009), 38-39.]

In this debate with atheist John Loftus, Dinesh D’Souza demonstrates the multiplicity of religions is no argument against religion as an enterprise.

Here is the transcript of the above:

To address what seems to me the one point, the glimmer of a point that emerged in [John Loftus’]  … opening statement. Essentially, John Loftus said that we “can’t really know if our religion is true because there happen to be many of them. If you happen to be born in Afghanistan, you’d be a Muslim. If you happen to be born in Tibet, you’d be a Buddhist.”

That’s true.

But what on Earth does that prove?

I happen to have been born in Bombay, India, which happens to be a Hindu country, the second largest group is Muslim. Even so, by choice, I am a Christian. Just because the majority religion is one thing doesn’t make it right or wrong.

By the way, what he says about Christianity or Islam, is equally true about beliefs in history or science.

If you are born in Oxford, England, you are more likely to believe the theory of evolution than if you are born in Oxford, Missouri.

If you are born in New Guinea, you are less likely to accept Einstein’s theory of relativity than if you are born in New York City.

What does this say about whether Einstein’s theory of relativity Is true?

Absolutely nothing.

In other words, John Loftus is guilty of what, in logic, is called the genetic fallacy.

It’s the fallacy of confusing the origin of an idea with its veracity, the origin of an idea has absolutely nothing to do with its veracity.

A rational handling of the idea that all religions are basically the same or that all religions are true paths to God. Unfortunately, many people hold to those misconceptions (recently featured in the “Life of Pi”) merely because they haven’t yet though carefully about it.

…and this from THEO-SOPHICAL RUMINATIONS:

Religious pluralists often claim that religious beliefs are culturally relative: the religion you adopt is determined by where you live, not the rationality/truth of the religion itself.  If you live in India you will probably be a Hindu; if you live in the U.S. you will probably be a Christian.  One’s personal religious beliefs are nothing more than a geographic accident, so we should not believe that our religion is true while others are not.

This argument is a double-edged sword.  If the religious pluralist had been born in Saudi Arabia he would have been a Muslim, and Muslims are religious particularists!  His pluralistic view of religion is dependent on his being born in 20th century Western society!

A more pointed critique of this argument, however, comes from the realm of logic.  The line of reasoning employed by the pluralist commits the genetic fallacy (invalidating a view based on how a person came to hold that view).  The fact of the matter is that the truth of a belief is independent of the influences that brought you to believe in it….

(See also GOT QUESTIONS)

Ravi Zacharias responds with “precise language” to a written question. With his patented charm and clarity, Ravi responds to the challenge of exclusivity in Christianity that skeptics challenge us with.

See more at WINTERY KNIGHT and APOLOGETICS INDEX:

(Mainly from Paul Copan’s “True for You, But not for Me“)

People have used this old parable to share their opinion or viewpoint that no one religion is the only route to God (pluralism). Pluralists believe that the road to God is wide. The opposite of this is that only one religion is really true (exclusivism).

What could a thoughtful person say in response?

  • Just because there are many different religious answers and systems doesn’t automatically mean pluralism is correct.
  • Simply because there are many political alternatives in the world (monarchy, fascism, communism, democracy, etc.) doesn’t mean that someone growing up in the midst of them is unable to see that some forms of government are better than others.
  • That kind of evaluation isn’t arrogant or presumptuous. The same is true of grappling with religion.
  • The same line of reasoning applies to the pluralist himself. If the pluralist grew up in Madagascar or medieval France, he would not have been a pluralist!
  • If we are culturally conditioned regarding our religious beliefs, then why should the religious pluralist think his view is less arbitrary or conditioned than the exclusivist’s?
  • If Christian faith is true, then the Christian would be in a better position than the pluralist to assess the status of other religions
  • How does the pluralist know he is correct? Even though he claims others don’t know Ultimate Reality as it really is, he implies that he does. (To say that the Ultimate Reality can’t be known is a statement of knowledge.)
  • If the Christian needs to justify Christianity’s claims, the pluralist’s views need just as much substantiation.

If we can’t know Reality as it really is, why think one exists at all? Why not simply try to explain religions as purely human or cultural manifestations without being anything more?

[….]

If you had been born in another country, is it at all likely that you would be a Christian?

Eric looks back at his family—devoutly Christian for four generations in Europe and America, twelve pastors among his relatives, an inner-city schoolteacher and Christian writer for parents—and readily acknowledges that his environment made it easy for him to become a Christian. Still, his faith was exposed to severe challenges as he rose to the top of his university class and as he lived in Asia as a college student. And he knows it took a conscious series of wrenching decisions in his teens and early adult years for him to choose to remain a Christian. Oddly, one of the biggest influences on his faith came from outside his culture through Chinese Christian friends.

John Hick has asserted that in the vast majority of cases, an individual’s religious beliefs will be the conditioned result of his geographical circumstances.1 Statistically speaking, Hick is correct. But what follows from that scenario? We saw in an earlier chapter that the bare fact that individuals hold different views about a thing doesn’t make relativism the inevitable conclusion. Similarly, the phenomenon of varying religious beliefs hardly entails religious pluralism. Before becoming a religious pluralist, an exclusivist has a few equally reasonable options:

  • One could continue to accept the religion one grew up with because it has the ring of truth.
  • One could reject the view one grew up with and become an adherent to a religion believed to be true.
  • One could opt to embrace a less demanding, more convenient religious view.
  • One could become a religious skeptic, concluding that, because the process of belief-formation is unreliable, no religion appears to really save.

Why should the view of pluralism be chosen instead of these other options?

An analogy from politics is helpful.2 As with the multiple religious alternatives in the world, there are many political alternatives—monarchy, Fascism, Marxism, or democracy. What if we tell a Marxist or a conservative Republican that if he had been raised in Nazi Germany, he would have belonged to the Hitler Youth? He will probably agree but ask what your point is. What is the point of this analogy? Just because a diversity of political options has existed in the history of the world doesn’t obstruct us from evaluating one political system as superior to its rivals. Just because there have been many political systems and we could have grown up in an alternate, inferior political system doesn’t mean we are arrogant for believing one is simply better.3

Furthermore, when a pluralist asks the question about cultural or religious conditioning, the same line of reasoning applies to the pluralist himself. The pluralist has been just as conditioned as his religious exclusivist counterparts have. Alvin Plantinga comments:

Pluralism isn’t and hasn’t been widely popular in the world at large; if the pluralist had been born in Madagascar, or medieval France, he probably wouldn’t have been a pluralist. Does it follow that he shouldn’t be a pluralist or that his pluralistic beliefs are produced in him by an unreliable belief-producing process? I doubt it.4

If all religions are culturally conditioned responses to the Real, can’t we say that someone like Hick himself has been culturally conditioned to hold a pluralistic view rather than that of an exclusivist? If that is the case, why should Hick’s view be any less arbitrary or accidental than another’s? Why should his perspective be taken as having any more authority than the orthodox Christian’s?

There is another problem: The exclusivist likely believes he has better basis for holding to his views than in becoming a religious pluralist; therefore he is not being arbitrary. John Hick holds that the religious exclusivist is arbitrary: “The arbitrariness of [the exclusivist position] is underlined by the consideration that in the vast majority of cases the religion to which a person adheres depends upon the accidents of birth.”5 But the exclusivist believes he is somehow justified in his position—perhaps the internal witness of the Holy Spirit or a conversion experience that has opened his eyes so that now he sees what his dissenters do not—even if he can’t argue against the views of others. Even if the exclusivist is mistaken, he can’t be accused of arbitrariness. Hick wouldn’t think of his own view as arbitrary, and he should not level this charge against the exclusivist.

A third problem emerges: How does the pluralist know that he is correct? Hick says that the Real is impossible to describe with human words; It transcends all language. But how does Hick know this? And what if the Real chose to disclose Itself to human beings in a particular form (i.e., religion) and not another? Why should the claims of that religion not be taken seriously?6 As Christians, who lay claim to the uniqueness of Christ, we are often challenged to justify this claim—and we rightly should. But the pluralist is also making an assertion that stands in just as much need of verification. He makes a claim about God, truth, the nature of reality. We ought to press the pluralist at this very point: “How do you know you are right? Furthermore, how do you know anything at all about the Ultimate Reality, since you think all human attempts to portray It are inadequate?”7

At this point we see cracks in Hick’s edifice.8 Although Hick claims to have drawn his conclusions about religion from the ground up, one wonders how he could arrive at an unknowable Ultimate Reality. In other words, if the Real is truly unknowable and if there is no common thread running through all the world religions so that we could formulate certain positive statements about It (like whether It is a personal being as opposed to an impersonal principle, monotheistic as opposed to polytheistic, or trinitary as opposed to unitary), then why bother positing Its existence at all? If all that the world religions know about God is what they perceive—not what they know of God as he really is, everything can be adequately explained through the human forms of religion. The Ultimate becomes utterly superfluous. And while It could exist, there is no good reason to think that It does. One could even ask Hick what prevents him from going one step further and saying that religion is wholly human.

Furthermore, when Hick begins at the level of human experience, this approach almost inevitably winds up treating all religions alike. The German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg writes, “If everything comes down to human experiences, then the obvious conclusion is to treat them all on the same level.”9

In contrast to Hick, the Christian affirms that the knowledge of God depends on his gracious initiative to reveal himself.10 We read in Scripture that the natural order of creation (what we see) actually reveals the eternal power and nature of the unseen God. He has not left himself without a witness in the natural realm (Rom. 1:20; also Acts 14:15–18; 17:24–29; Ps. 19:1). God’s existence and an array of his attributes can be known through his effects. His fingerprints are all over the universe. The medieval theologian-philosopher Thomas Aquinas, for instance, argued in this way: “Hence the existence of God, insofar as it is not self-evident to us, can be demonstrated from those of His effects which are known to us.”11 What we know about God and an overarching moral law in light of his creation, in fact, means we are without excuse (Rom. 2:14–15). (We’ll say more about general revelation in Part IV.) So rather than dismissing the observable world as inadequate, why can’t we say that what we see in the world serves as a pointer toward God?

Thus there is a role for Christian apologetics to play in defending the rationality and plausibility of the Christian revelation.12 This role—especially in the face of conflicting worldviews—shouldn’t be underestimated.13 While Christians should be wary of furnishing arguments as “proofs,” which tend to imply a mathematical certainty, a modest and plausible defense of Christianity—carried out in dependence on God’s Spirit—often provides the mental evidence people need to pursue God with heart, soul, and mind.

Deflating “If You Grew Up in India, You’d Be a Hindu.”

The phenomenon of differing religious beliefs doesn’t automatically entail religious pluralism. There are other options.

Simply because there are many political alternatives in the world (monarchy, Fascism, communism, democracy, etc.) doesn’t mean someone growing up in the midst of them is unable to see that some forms of government are better than others. That kind of evaluation isn’t arrogant or presumptuous. The same is true of grappling with religion.

The same line of reasoning applies to the pluralist himself. If the pluralist grew up in Madagascar or medieval France, he would not have been a pluralist!

If we are culturally conditioned regarding our religious beliefs, then why should the religious pluralist think his view is less arbitrary or conditioned than the exclusivist’s?

If Christian faith is true, then the Christian would be in a better position than the pluralist to assess the status of other religions.

How does the pluralist know he is correct? Even though he claims that others don’t know Ultimate Reality as It really is, he implies that he does. (To say that the Ultimate Reality can’t be known is to make at least one statement of knowledge.)

If the Christian needs to justify Christianity’s claims, the pluralist’s views need just as much substantiation.

If we can’t know Reality as It really is, why think one exists at all? Why not simply try to explain religions as purely human or cultural manifestations without being anything more?

NOTES

1. An Interpretation of Religion, 2.

2. Van Inwagen, ”Non Est Hick,” 213-214.

3. John Hick’s reply to this analogy is inadequate, thus leaving the traditional Christian view open to the charge of arrogance: ”The Church’s claim is not about the relative merits of different political systems, but about the eternal fate of the entire human race” (”The Epistemological Challenge of Religious Pluralism,” Faith and Philosophy 14 [July 1997]: 282). Peter van Inwagen responds by saying that Hick’s accusation is irrelevant to the charge of arrogance. Whether in the political or religious realm, I still must figure out which beliefs to hold among a number of options. So if I adopt a certain set of beliefs, then ”I have to believe that I and those who agree with me are right and that the rest of the world is wrong…. What hangs on one’s accepting a certain set of beliefs, or what follows from their truth, doesn’t enter into the question of whether it is arrogant to accept them” (”A Reply to Professor Hick,” Faith and Philosophy 14 [July 1997]: 299-300).

4. ”Pluralism,” 23-24.

5. This citation is from a personal letter from John Hick to Alvin Plantinga. See Alvin Plantinga’s article, ”Ad Hick,” Faith and Philosophy 14 (July 1997): 295. The critique of Hick in this paragraph is taken from Plantinga’s article in Faith and Philosophy (295-302). 

6. D’Costa, “The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religions,” 229.

7. Hick has claimed that he does not know but merely presents a ”hypothesis” (see his rather unilluminating essay ”The Possibility of Religious Pluralism,” Religious Studies 33 [1997]: 161-166). However, his claims that exclusivism is ”arbitrary” or has ”morally or religiously revolting” consequences (in More Than One Way?, 246) betrays his certainty. 

8. This and the following paragraphs are based on Paul R. Eddy’s argument in ”Religious Pluralism and the Divine,” 470-78.

9. ”Religious Pluralism and Conflicting Truth Claims,” in Gavin D’Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1990), 102.

10. On this point, I draw much from D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God, 182-189. 

11. Summa Theologiae I.2.3c.

12. Two fine popular-level apologetics books are William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1994) and J. P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1987). A bit more rigorous but rewarding is Stuart C. Hackett, The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelation Claim (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1984). Three other apologetics books worth noting are Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1994); Norman Geisler, Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1976); and Winfried Corduan, Reasonable Faith.

13. Some well-meaning Christians have minimized the place of Christian apologetics for a number of reasons. But their reasons, discussed by C. Stephen Evans, tend to be inadequate: (1) ”Human reason has been damaged by sin,” but reason is not worthless, only defective. (2) ”Trying to use general revelation is presumptuous”: Seeking to persuade a person with arguments from general revelation doesn’t assume unassisted and autonomous reason (after all, reason is a gift from God); any such approach ought to rely upon God–just as presenting the gospel message should. (3) ”Natural revelation is unnecessary since special revelation is sufficient”: This argument wrongly assumes that God cannot use the world he created and the reason he gave us to interpret that creation to draw people to himself. (4) ”The arguments for God’s existence aren’t very good”: The Christian apologist should recognize that God has made the world in such a way that if a person is looking for loopholes to avoid God’s existence, he may do so, but it is not due to a lack of evidence. It seems that God would permit evidence for his existence to be resistible and discountable so that humans do not look like utter nitwits if they reject God. There is more to belief than mere intellectual reasons; people often have moral reasons for rejecting God. (See Evans’ fine essay, ”Apologetics in a New Key,” in Craig and McLeod, The Logic of Rational Theism, 65-75.) 

The story of the six blind men and the elephant is one you hear then and again. In this short response you will see how this story collapses under its own weight.

Example of the failure of the Genetic Fallacy:

Even if they are skeptical of their faith, which should be/is a natural human tendency and should be encouraged in an environment where one feels safe. I do wish, before the larger post of studies below, that there was another fallacy presented in the above video. And it deals with the genetic fallacy (WIKI). It was pointed out that some people are born in places where Christianity is the dominant philosophy, and so they are Christian. Others are born in places where they have a Hindu influence, a Buddhist influence, or like in many parts of Europe, a secular influence. This however does nothing to disprove a religious belief as true or not true. I will give an example.

In the West we accept the truth of Einstein relativity as a scientific fact (or close to a fact). In fact, many theories based on this are shown to work out with these assumptions of fact in mind. Fine, we are born into a culture that believes this truth to be true. Now, if you were born in Papua New Guinea, the general populace may reject the truth of this since as a whole their culture is not steeped in this belief or the scientific method. This has or says nothing about the truth of Einstein’s theory. Which is why this is a fallacy and should be rejected.

MORE:

The above is an example of relativism run-amock with young people in downtown Durham after the Pride Festival at Duke University Sept 28th 2013. Another interview here.

(This post is updated, as the video from the “Thrive Apologetics Conference” was deleted. New information was substituted in its place.) Posted below are three presentations. The first presentation (audio) is Dr. Beckwith’s classic presentation where high school and college kids get a 2-week crash course in the Christian worldview.

The following two presentations are by Gregory Koukle. The first is a UCLA presentation, the second is an excellent presentation ay Biola University entitled “The Intolerance of Tolerance.” Enjoy this updated post.

Here is — firstly — a classic presentation by Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason.

Moral Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Midair from Veritas [3] on Vimeo.

Below this will be another presentation that is one of Koukl’s best yet, and really is a video update to the excellent book, Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly in Mid-Air… a phrase common to Francis Schaeffer, “feet planted firmly in mid-air.”

To wit, Humanism:

Since present day Humanism vilifies Judeo-Christianity as backward, its goal to assure progress through education necessitates an effort to keep all mention of theism out of the classroom. Here we have the irony of twentieth century Humanism, a belief system recognized by the Supreme Court as a non-theistic religion, foisting upon society the unconstitutional prospect of establishment of a state-sanctioned non-theistic religion which legislates against the expression of a theistic one by arguing separation of church & state. To dwell here in more detail is beyond the scope of this article, but to close, here are some other considerations:

“We should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute” (Schaeffer)

In the earlier spirit of cooperation with the Christian church the ethics or values of the faith were “borrowed” by the humanists. In their secular framework, however, denying the transcendent, they negated the theocentric foundation of those values, (the character of God), while attempting to retain the ethics. So it can be said that the Humanist, then, lives on “borrowed capital”. In describing this situation, Francis Schaeffer observed that: “…the Humanist has both feet firmly planted in mid-air.” His meaning here is that while the Humanist may have noble ideals, there is no rational foundation for them. An anthropocentric view says that mankind is a “cosmic accident”; he comes from nothing, he goes to nothing, but in between he’s a being of supreme dignity. What the Humanist fails to face is that with no ultimate basis, his ideals, virtues and values are mere preferences, not principles. Judging by this standard of “no ultimate standard”, who is to say whose preferences are to be “dignified”, ultimately?

See more quotes HERE

FLASHBACK: Media Mislabels LaRouche Activists Right-Wing

Published by Papa Giorgio

(A GOOD PORTION OF THIS DATES FROM 2010)

(BTW, Lyndon LaRouche died in February 2019 at 96-years old.) This is the political cult I always forget about, Lyndon LaRouche (pronounced le-ru). She won her candidacy even with the fact that “during the campaign, she was photographed carrying an oversized portrait of the President with a Hitler-style mustache penciled on his lip.” Remember the news broadcasts on the poster with Obama and a Hitler mustache? Well, all the posters that say this on them:

OBAMA NAZI SIGNS

Life is truly stranger than fiction. Not only does this picture show Kesha Rogers holding the Obama/Hitler sign, but it even says it is paid for by her campaign on the bottom (click to enlarge):


“Houston, We Have A Problem”
is so appropriate

This story (the LaRouche movement and recent political activity) is an old one… one that I commented on quite a while ago. These person’s even visited my old job once (Whole Foods). 

NAZI OBAMA @DEMOCRAT CAMPAIGN

Here is the BREITBART post on her:

…the state-run media won’t run this photo.

They won’t publish this photo because it doesn’t fit their narrative. Remember last year when the Democratic-Media Complex reported that the tea party protesters were waving Obama-Hitler signs? What the media purposely omitted from their stories was the fact that the protesters waving these astroturfed Obama-Hitler signs were radical left-wing extremists. They were radical activists from the LaRouche organization. But, this didn’t fit the state-run media’s narrative that tea party activists were radicals and racists so they omitted this from their reports.

Earlier this year, the corrupt media and prominent democrats continued to smear tea party activists by reporting that the conservative protesters on Capitol Hill harassed Black Caucus members, called them the n-word, and spit at these Dems as they paraded though the tea party crowd on their way to ram nationalized health care through Congress. This was a lie. It never happened as video later revealed. However, the corrupt national media never retracted their story nor did they apologize despite the overwhelming amount of evidence that proved their racist accusations were complete fiction.

That’s why the media won’t show this photo of Democrat Kesha Rogers. It doesn’t fit their narrative.

Kesha won her primary last week. This Texas Democrat wants to impeach Obama and “take our troops out of the war zone and put them into space.” This makes about as much sense as the Obama-Pelosi “spend your way to wealth” plan, only not as dangerous. Don’t look for the media to give this Texas loon much attention in the months ahead.

Could you imagine the outrage if this was at a Tea Party? And if it is, it is because of a LaRouchite! Do you not know who Lyndon Lerouche is, there is a good WIKI ARTICLE on him. Here is the HOTAIR’s dig on this story:

The nominee for the Texas’ CD-22 has publicly called for Barack Obama’s impeachment and wants to abolish the UN.  Democrats would have a field day making Kesha Rogers the face of the Republican Party across the entire nation … if it weren’t for the fact that Rogers is a Democrat (TIME MAGAZINE):

South Carolina’s unexpected Democratic nominee for the US Senate, mystery man Alvin Greene, says he wants to play golf with Barack Obama. But in Texas, another surprise Democratic primary winner, congressional nominee Kesha Rogers, wants to impeach the President. So while South Carolina party officials are still unsure of what to do about Greene’s success at the ballot box, Texas Democrats have no such reservations — they wasted little time in casting Rogers into exile and offering no support or recognition of her campaign to win what once was Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s old seat.

Rogers, 33, told TIME she is a “full time political activist” in the Lyndon LaRouche Youth Movement, a recruiting arm of the LaRouche political organization that is active on many college campuses. The LYM espouses LaRouche opposition to free trade and “globalism” (the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund) and it also calls for a return to a humanist classical education, emphasizing the works of Plato and Leibnitz. On her professional looking campaign website, kesharogers.com, she touts the LaRouche political philosophy — a mix of support for the economic policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the impeachment of President Obama — and calls Obama a “London and Wall Street backed puppet” whose policies will destroy the Democratic Party.

Well, maybe Texas Democrats in the 22nd district just got fooled from another Greene-like stealth candidacy.  I’m sure they didn’t hear about Rogers’ nutty, LaRouchian politics before casting their ballots.  Rogers probably got listed first on the ballot, right?  Actually she was, but that’s not why she won:

Unlike South Carolina’s Greene, Rogers ran a high profile campaign, staking out a corner on a major intersection in the district to appear almost daily with a large sign: “Save NASA. Impeach Obama.” She garnered 7,467 votes, 53% of the vote, in a three way race that included a local information systems analyst Doug Blatt, who gained endorsements from local Democratic clubs and labor groups, and Freddie John Weider Jr., a preacher and onetime Libertarian candidate; Blatt came in second with 28% of the vote and Weider won 20%.

Now Democrats have refused to provide her any support, Time reports, accusing her of racism because of her connection to the LaRouche movement — which is an interesting allegation, considering that Rogers is African-American.  Maybe someone should have looked at her picture before leaping immediately to the race-baiting smear.  They would have been better off questioning her sanity…..

…(read more)…

Here is Kesha being interviewed by “LaRouche TV.”

MORE EXAMPLES OF SIGNS

The below signs are from the Democratic Linden LaRouche camp. There was one photo that made it into the mainstream media that was at times cropped so you wouldn’t see the race of the young man, but as you can see, the guy holding this sign up is a young black man:

Kesha is in a political cult, and putting a LaRouchite into office, considering their across the board acceptance of just about every conspiracy theory available, is an option I will campaign against. There is also concerted cultish aspects of brainwashing as well. The reason you here this push to support NASA is that the LaRouchite’s want to (or wanted to) have a permanent colony on Mars by 2025, this is now pushed back to 2027. 

One thing I wish to supplant is the idea that this is some sort of “Right Wing” group.

LAROUCHE PRESIDENTIAL RUNS

NEWSBUSTERS “busted” this liberal myth when they pointed out the following:

….For written at the poster’s bottom is the web address “LaRouchePAC.com,” the political action committee website for Communist and perpetual Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.

No right-winger he. And neither he nor his acolytes are likely ones to be “stoked by the provocative megaphone of Rush Limbaugh.” In fact (from Wikipedia):

In 1979, LaRouche formed a Political Action Committee called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC). LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States seven times, beginning in 1980….

…(read more)…

CROOKS & LIARS

I think the mainstream media and bloggers who think themselves erudite enough to broadly claim political affiliation of this movement, should think twice. For instance, CROOKS & LIARS (a Leftist site) said this after showing Bill O’Reilly’s comments on it (sorry for the cuss word, typical though of the Left) [I combined this old Bill O’Reilly with two other videos]:

Crooks & Liars “did an interesting thing the day after last night,” they lied about the LaRouche’ites!

Bill O’Reilly did an interesting thing last night when he reran that footage of Barney Frank castigating that woman carrying an Obama-as-Hitler sign at his town-hall meeting on health care: He completely omitted the fact that the woman who Frank was castigating was in fact a member of the FAR-RIGHT Lyndon Larouche cult.

All O’Reilly could muster was to mention that the woman was “a political activist.” But that’s like calling a Great White Shark a fish.

No, right-wingers like O’Reilly have been eagerly airbrushing out the existence of right-wing extremists from their worldview for some time now, embodied by their reaction to that DHS bulletin. But it’s getting harder and harder to do all the time now.

Because, as we’ve noted, the far-right extremists are bubbling up everywhere in supposedly mainstream conservative circles these days — particularly at the tea parties and their associated health-care protests.

Most recently, it turns out that the guys who brought those guns to a health-care forum in Arizona in fact were longtime members of the old Arizona Vipers Militia. These were characters who, prior to their arrests in 1996, had stockpiled close to 2,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and conducted field training exercises, practiced bomb-making, and trained with illegal automatic weapons.

Now, all the Fox talkers have been in heavy denial about extremists showing up for their tea-party protests, even making a regular joke out of it by asking the protesters they have on their show if they’re Klan members and the like.

But it’s becoming clearer all the time that, while not everyone at these events is an extremist, the percentages of them keep going up and up. And with them, so does the threat to public safety.

AGAIN:

  • He completely omitted the fact that the woman who Frank was castigating was in fact a member of the FAR-RIGHT Lyndon Larouche cult.

(*Annoying Buzzer Noise*) Nope, this needs a rewrite. 

The medias lack of care for the LaRouchites showing up at meetings with Obama/Hitler signs is pointed out by the WEEKLY STANDARD as well:

CNN’s Larry King showed the above video of Barney Frank laying the smack down on a woman at a townhall meeting who compared Obama to Hitler. CNN left out the fact that this woman is a Lyndon LaRouche Democrat.

[….]

No one disputes that LaRouchites are on the fringe — but it’s indisputable that they are fringe Democrats. They oppose Obamacare because they want a single-payer plan.

While Nancy Pelosi and liberal talk-show host Bill Press have been smearing protesters as fascists and Nazis, left-wing bloggers have been attacking protesters for comparing Obama to Hitler. It seems townhall attendees just can’t win….

AGAIN, RAN 8-TIMES AS LEFTY

Lyndon LaRouche Presidential/political runs:

  • LaRouche was a presidential candidate from 1976 to 2004. He campaigned for one such election while serving his sentence for fraudulence. He had run once for his ‘US Labor Party’ and seven times for the ‘Democratic Party.’ (THE FAMOUS PEOPLE)

Some “Right-Wing” guy? Ran first for a self made Marxist Organization, then seven more times as a Democrat.

FASCIST? OR SOCIALIST?

Ideological Swings:

In 1977-78, LaRouche initiated an ideological change, an evolution from “socialism” to “nationalism”, well documented by Denis King and Chip Berlet.

This “evolution” was marked by a radical re-definition of “Fascism”. To this purpose he wrote in 1977 “What Actually Is Fascism?” where he said:

“The Nazi propaganda emphasis on “Krupp steel” and other symbols of industrial development points up the fact that to rule Germany the Nazis were obliged to play upon the deep desire for industrial and technological progress within even the ranks of numerous layers of nominal Nazi supporters and party members. There was a profound discrepancy between the systematic destruction of industry and the labor force under Schacht and the nationalist impulses of important varieties of German citizens who went over to support of the Nazis largely on the basis of hatred of Versailles and a commitment to restoration of Germany’s industrial progress.” “In short, all of those features of Nazi Germany’s policy which are generally attributed to fascism are not the ideological excretion of a fascist “sociological phenomenon” but are properly termed Schachtianism in its natural course and consequences. The essence of fascism, if we mean by fascism the deprecated features of the Nazi order, is Schachtian economics.”

In other words there are “good” and “bad” Nazis:

“The majority of Nazi supporters were not fascists, but nationalists.”

and consequentially:

“What is to be stressed most emphatically in this connection is the fallacy of the “conservatism tends to fascism” argument.”

To confirm his ideological move from “socialism” to “nationalism”, he wrote that year:

“I never had the conception of founding a “true Marxist” association. […] We have never been Marxists, except as regarding Marx as the highest preceding advancement of essential human knowledge. […] More profoundly, as we change we do not change.”

contradicting himself from what he wrote a year earlier:

“Labor Committee and allied Communist forces within the capitalist sector generally are working overnight, constantly, to bring into being a new Marxist International throughout the capitalist sector.” 

when he wanted to establish “socialism” world-wide:

“The important point to be added to that, is that such a form of society is within reach during this century. We have before us the immediate need and possibility to establish an intermediate form of society known as workers’ government, out of which in approximately a generation’ s time, an actual socialist form of human existence can emerge.”

LaRouche redefined Marxism from a “higher”, philosophical standpoint; “higher” Marxism meant “good” industrial Capitalism, Marx and Benjamin Franklin were said to share the same, common ancestry and philosophical outlook: Plato’s Republic, trying to combine “socialism” (Soviet Republics) and… the Republican party! ({“republican” in LaRouche’s code-words, meaning Plato’s “Republic”).

In his “Creating a Republican Labor Party” pamphlet, LaRouche wrote:

“The republican party is thousands of years old. It is traced in terms of formal historical knowledge available to us today to the writings of Plato and Plato’s Academy at Athens, and to Alexander the Great’s city-building policies.”

The “new” Karl Marx was redefined in “The Karl Marx Karl Marx Did Not Know” (Fall 1977).

His 1980 U.S. presidential election was based on an alliance between “labor” (socialist) forces and “republican” (nationalist) forces and geopolitically between the “East” (USSR) and the “West”.

This ideological and philosophical reshaping can be measured with help of three key-documents during that period: 1/ “The Case of Walter Lippmann” (May 1977), 2/ “Two Tactics of the Inner PCI” (April 1978) and 3/ “The Secret Known Only to the Inner Elites” (May-June 1978). This last document is still considered by the LaRouchies as the real founding document of LaRouche’s Organisation.

In this 1977 revisionist document “What Actually Is Fascism?” he explained that “Fascism” was in fact synonymous with… “financial austerity” imposed by Hjalmar Schacht, a “cannibalization” of the German economy which led to Hitler’s war!

Capitalism therefore still leads to Fascism/Imperialism…

The “real enemy” is still “Capitalism” or rather “Capitalists”, not Fascists who are victims of these “Capitalists”.

But who was Schacht? What really happened to the German economy under his influence? Why does LaRouche focuses exclusively on somebody who was a German financial expert and Minister of Economics from 1935 until 1937 only (and who began to lose power after the implementation of the Four Year Plan in 1936 by Hermann Göring which put Germany on the brink of bankruptcy)?

Because by reducing “nazism” only to one single cause: “Hjalmar Schacht”, it is more convenient to re-write History. Forget about Hitler’s and the Nazis’ open intentions to start a war against their neighbors from the onset…\\ LaRouche only needs to claim Hjalmar Schacht was a “British agent”, an “environmentalist” or a “Jewish protege” and then, LaRouche could conclude that “Nazism” was an “ecologist”, a “British” or a “Jewish” conspiracy (and vice-versa)! Consequently, any economic policy or economist or politician could be labeled as “schachtian” or “nazi”!…

SOME HISTORY ON WHO JOINED FASCIST MOVEMENT

…on March 23, 1919, one of the most famous socialists in Italy founded a new party, the Fasci di Combattimento, a term that means “fascist combat squad.” This was the first official fascist party and thus its founding represents the true birth of fascism. By the same token, this man was the first fascist. The term “fascism” can be traced back to 1914, when he founded the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, a political movement whose members called them­selves fascisti or fascists.

In 1914, this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world. His fellow Marx­ists and socialists recognized him as a great leader of socialism. His decision to become a fascist was controversial, yet he received congratu­lations from Lenin who continued to regard him as a faithful revolution­ary socialist. And this is how he saw himself.

That same year, because of his support for Italian involvement in World War I, he would be expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for “heresy,” but this does not mean he ceased to be a socialist. It was common practice for socialist parties to expel dissenting fellow social­ists for breaking on some fine point with the party line. This party reject insisted that he had been kicked out for making “a revision of socialism from the revolutionary point of view.” For the rest of his life—right until his lifeless body was displayed in a town square in Milan—he upheld the central tenets of socialism which he saw as best reflected in fascism.

Who, then, was this man? He was the future leader of fascist Italy, the one whom Italians called Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini’s socialist credentials were impeccable. He had been raised in a socialist family and made a public declaration in 1901, at the age of eighteen, of his convictions. By twenty-one, he was an orthodox Marx­ist familiar not only with the writings of Marx and Engels but also of many of the most influential German, Italian, and French Marxists of the fin de siecle period. Like other orthodox Marxists, Mussolini rejected religious faith and authored anti-Catholic pamphlets repudiating his native Catholicism.

Mussolini embarked on an active career as a writer, editor, and political organizer. Exiled to Switzerland between 1902 and 1904, he collaborated with the Italian Socialist Party weekly issued there and also wrote for Il Proletario, a socialist weekly published in New York. In 1909 Mussolini made another foreign sojourn to Trento—then part of Austria-Hungary—where he worked for the socialist party and edited its news­paper. Returning the next year to his hometown of Forli, he edited the weekly socialist publication La Lotta di Classe (The Class War). He wrote so widely on Marxism, socialist theory, and contemporary politics that his output now fills seven volumes.

Mussolini wasn’t just an intellectual; he organized workers’ strikes on behalf of the socialist movement both inside and outside of Italy and was twice jailed for his activism. In 1912, Mussolini was recognized as a socialist leader at the Socialist Congress at Reggio Emilia and was appointed to the Italian Socialist Party’s board of directors. That same year, at the age of twenty-nine, he became editor of Avanti!, the official publication of the party.

From the point of view of the progressive narrative—a narrative I began to challenge in the previous chapter—Mussolini’s shift from Marxian socialism to fascism must come as a huge surprise. In the pro­gressive paradigm, Marxian socialism is the left end of the spectrum and fascism is the right end of the spectrum. Progressive incredulity becomes even greater when we see that Mussolini wasn’t just any socialist; he was the recognized head of the socialist movement in Italy. Moreover, he didn’t just climb aboard the fascist bandwagon; he created it.

Today we think of fascism’s most famous representative as Adolf Hitler. Yet as I mentioned earlier, Hitler didn’t consider himself a fascist. Rather, he saw himself as a National Socialist. The two ideologies are related in that they are both based on collectivism and centralized state power. They emerge, one might say, from a common point of origin. Yet they are also distinct; fascism, for instance, had no intrinsic connection with anti-Semitism in the way that National Socialism did.

In any event, Hitler was an obscure local organizer in Germany when Mussolini came to power and, following his famous March on Rome, established the world’s first fascist regime in Italy in 1922. Hitler greatly admired Mussolini and aspired to become like him. Mussolini, Hitler said, was “the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself.” Hitler modeled his failed Munich Putsch in November 1923 on Mussolini’s successful March on Rome.

When Hitler first came to power he kept a bust of Mussolini in his office and one German observer termed him “Germany’s Mussolini.” Yet later, when the two men first met, Mussolini was not very impressed by Hitler. Mussolini became more respectful after 1939 when Hitler conquered Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Norway, and France. Hitler continued to uphold Mussolini as “that unparalleled statesman” and “one of the Caesars” and confessed that without Italian fascism there would not have been a German National Socialism: “The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt.”

Hitler was, like Mussolini, a man of the Left. Hitler too was a social­ist and a labor leader who founded the German Socialist Workers’ Party with a platform very similar to that of Mussolini’s fascist party. Yet Hitler came to power in the 1930s while Mussolini ruled through most of the 1920s. Mussolini was, during those years, much more famous than Hitler. He was recognized as the founding father of fascism. So any account of the origin of fascism must focus not on Hitler but on Mus­solini. Mussolini is the original and prototypical fascist.

From Socialism to Fascism

So how—to return to the progressive paradigm—do progressives account for Mussolini’s conversion from socialism to fascism, or more precisely for Mussolini’s simultaneous embrace of both? The problem is further deepened by the fact that Mussolini was not alone. Hundreds of leading socialists, initially in Italy but subsequently in Germany, France, and other countries, also became fascists. In fact, I will go further to say that all the leading figures in the founding of fascism were men of the Left. “The first fascists,” Anthony James Gregor tells us, “were almost all Marxists.”

I will cite a few examples. Jean Allemane, famous for his role in the Dreyfus case, one of the great figures of French socialism, became a fascist later in life. So did the socialist Georges Valois. Marcel Deat, the founder of the Parti Socialiste de France, eventually quit and started a pro-fascist party in 1936. Later, he became a Nazi collaborator during the Vichy regime. Vacques Doriot a French communist, moved his Parti Populaire Francais into the fascist camp.

The Belgian socialist theoretician Henri de Man transitioned to becoming a fascist theoretician. In England. Oswald Mosley, a socialist and Labor Party Member of Parliament, eventually broke with the Labor Party because he found it insufficiently radical. He later founded the British Union of Fascists and became the country’s leading Nazi sympa­thizer. In Germany, the socialist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann embraced Hitler and produced plays during the Third Reich. After the war, he became a communist and staged his productions in Soviet-dominated East Berlin

In Italy, philosopher Giovanni Gentile moved from Marxism to fas­cism, as did a host of Italian labor organizers: Ottavio Dinale, Tullio Masotti, Carlo Silvestri, and Umberto Pasella. The socialist writer Agos­tino Lanzillo joined Mussolini’s parliament as a member of the fascist party Nicola Bombacci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, became Mussolini’s top adviser in Salo. Gentile’s disciple Ugo Spirito, who also served Mussolini at Salo, moved from Marxism to fascism and then back to Marxism. Like Hauptmann, Spirito became a communist sympathizer after World War II and called for a new “syn­thesis” between communism and fascism.

Others who made the same journey from socialism to fascism will be named in this chapter, and one thing that will become very clear is that these are not “conversion” stories. These men didn’t “switch” from socialism to fascism. Rather, they became fascists in the same way that Russian socialists became Leninist Bolsheviks. Like their Russian coun­terparts, these socialists believed themselves to be growing into fascism, maturing into fascism, because they saw fascism as the most well thought out, practical form of socialism for the new century.

Progressivism simply cannot account for the easy traffic from social­ism to fascism. Consequently, progressives typically maintain complete silence about this whole historical relationship which is deeply embar­rassing to them. In all the articles comparing Trump to Mussolini I searched in vain for references to Mussolini’s erstwhile Marxism and lifelong attachment to socialism. Either from ignorance or from design, these references are missing.

Progressive biographical accounts that cannot avoid Mussolini’s socialist past nevertheless turn around and accuse Mussolini—as the Socialist Party of Italy did in 1914—of “selling out” to fascism for money and power. Other accounts contend that whatever Mussolini’s original convictions, the very fact that his fascists later battled the Marxists and traditional socialists clearly shows that Mussolini did not remain a social­ist or a man of the Left.

But these explanations make no sense. When Mussolini “sold out” he became an outcast. He had neither money nor power. Nor did any of the first fascists embrace fascism for this reason. Rather, they became fascists because they saw fascism as the only way to rescue socialism and make it viable. In other words, their defection was within socialism—they sought to create a new type of socialism that would actually draw a mass following and produce the workers’ revolution that Marx antic­ipated and hoped for.

Vicious fights among socialist and leftist factions are a recognized feature of the history of socialism. In Russia, for example, there were bloody confrontations between the rival Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Later the Bolsheviks split into Leninists and Trotskyites, and Trotsky ended up dead on Lenin’s orders. These were all men of the Left. What these bloody rivalries prove is that the worst splits and conflicts some­times arise among people who are ideologically very similar and differ on relatively small—though not small to them—points of doctrine.

In this chapter I will trace the development of fascism by showing precisely how it grew out of a doctrinal division within the community of Marxian socialists. In short, I will prove that fascism is exclusively a product of the Left. This is not a case of leftists who moved right. On the contrary, the fascists were on the left end of the socialist movement. They saw themselves not as jettisoning Marxism but as saving it from obsolescence. From their perspective, Marxism and socialism were too inert and needed to be adjusted leftward. In other words, they viewed fascism as more revolutionary than traditional socialism.

[….]

Mussolini didn’t believe in race and he wasn’t initially a nationalist; rather, he was a revolutionary syndicalist. The term syndicalism refers to the associations or syndicates to which workers belonged. These were autonomous workers organizations that resembled unions, but they were not unions because the syndicates were organized regionally rather than by corporation or occupation. As dedicated Marxists, the revolutionary syndicalists agreed with Marx that class associations were primary, and that they must be the organizing principle of socialist revolution.

Very much in keeping with this class emphasis that was so central to Marx, the syndicalists, strongly influenced by Sorel, sought to rally the labor syndicates through a general strike that would overthrow the ruling class and establish socialism in Italy. This is what made them “revolutionary.” They intended to foment revolution, not wait for it to happen. They were considered the smartest, most dedicated people in the Italian Socialist Party and they occupied the left wing of the party.

The big names in revolutionary syndicalism were Giuseppe Prezzolini, Angelo O. Olivetti, Arturo Labriola, Filippo Corridoni, Paolo Orano, Michele Bianchi, and Sergio Panunzio. Most of them were writ­ers or labor organizers. All of them were socialists, and shortly all of them would be camelascists, even though Labriola opposed Mussolini’s regime when it came to power and Corridoni, who was killed in World War I, didn’t live to see it.

Mussolini was their acknowledged leader. He knew them well and conspired with them at meetings and rallies. He read their books and articles and published in their magazines like the Avanguardia Socialista, founded by Laboriola, which was the leading journal of syndicalist thought. Mussolini also reviewed and published the leading syndicalists in his own socialist publications.

Like all revolutionary socialists, the syndicalists had little faith in democratic parliamentary procedures and, consistent with Sorel and Lenin, they sought a charismatic leader who would inspire the workers to action. Mussolini, more than anyone else, fit their prescription. Mus­solini was the one who led the syndicalists into a union with the nation­alists in order to form the new socialist hybrid called fascism in Italy and (with some modifications) National Socialism in Germany.

The syndicalists organized three general strikes in Italy in 1904, 1911, and 1913. Mussolini supported the strikes. The 1904 strike began in Milan and spread across the country. Five million workers walked off their jobs. The nation was paralyzed: there was no public transportation, and no one could buy anything. Even so, the strike ended without caus­ing either the fall of the government or the installation of socialism.

Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the NAZI Roots of the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017), 65-70, 82-83.

 

Obama’s Gay Trysts | Dinesh D’Souza & Larry Sinclair

Published by Papa Giorgio

I wasn’t tracking with this, but here is the death list of the guys who had gay sex with Obama — who have been killed:

….There were two other openly gay men in Wright’s church: Larry Bland and Nate Spencer. In late 2007, as Obama began his ascent to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, in a span of 1½ months, all three men “conveniently” died:

  • Bland was murdered execution-style on November 17, 2007;
  • Young was murdered execution-style on December 24, 2007;
  • Spencer reportedly died of septicemia, pneumonia, and HIV on December 26, 2007. (Death certificates of Bland and Young, HERE.)

Now, Young’s elderly mother is speaking out about her suspicions that her son was murdered to protect Obama’s reputation and assure his political future as President….

Here is Dinesh D’Souza talking about this with Larry Sinclair:

Columbus Day vs. National Indigenous People’s Day

Published by Papa Giorgio

Christopher Columbus

The Left’s Public Enemy #1

Michael Knowles explains the difference between leftist lies and reality, and why Christopher Columbus is the Left’s public enemy #1

An Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Monkey Wrench

On June 23, 1865, in what was the last land battle of the war, Confederate Brigadier General and Cherokee Chief, Stand Watie, finally surrendered his predominantly Cherokee, Oklahoma Indian force to the Union. He was the last Confederate General “standing.”

  • …That same month, Watie’s command surprised a group of soldiers that included troops from the 79th U.S. Colored Infantry who were cutting hay for livestock at the fort. Instead of accepting the surrender of the African Americans, the Confederates killed 40 of them. Such exploits earned Watie promotion to brigadier general… (HISTORY BUFF)

Mayan and Aztec “Terrorism”

UPDATE!

  • (ABOVE) A stone Tzompantli (skull rack) found during the excavations of Templo Mayor (Great Temple) in Tenochtitlan. New research has found the ‘skull towers’ which used real human heads were just a small part of a massive display of skulls known as Huey Tzompantli.

The DAILY MAIL informs us of the utter devastation of human sacrifice the Aztecs “enjoyed” — and why the cartels are the way they are. They are really a death cult version (Santa Muerte [watch your volume, video starts playing automatically at link]) of this early history:

…In 2015 archaeologists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) found a gruesome ‘trophy rack’ near the site of the Templo Mayor, one of the main temples in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which later became Mexico City.

Now, they say the find was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the ‘skull tower’ was just a small part of a massive display of skulls known as Huey Tzompantli that was the size of a basketball court.

The new research is slowly uncovering the vast scale of the human sacrifices, performed to honor the gods.

According to the new research detailed in Science,  captives were first taken to the city’s Templo Mayor, or great temple, where priests removed their still-beating hearts.

The bodies were then decapitated and priests removed the skin and muscle from the corpses’ heads.

Large holes were carved into the sides of the skulls, allowing them to be placed onto a large wooden pole.

They were then placed in Tenochtitlan’s tzompantli, an enormous rack of skulls built in front of the Templo Mayor, a pyramid with two temples on top.

[….]

Some Spanish conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls.

The skull edifices were mentioned by Andres de Tapia, a Spanish soldier who accompanied Cortes in the 1521 conquest of Mexico..

In his account of the campaign, de Tapia said he counted tens of thousands of skulls at what became known as the Huey Tzompantli….

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

(The Below Was Posted Oct, 2017)

This is a combining of three previous posts to make it easier for those looking for refutation to the Left’s understanding of Columbus Day. Another resource is this excellent video.

A multicultural approach to the conquest of Mexico usually does not investigate the tragedy of the collision between 16th-century imperial Spain and the Aztec Empire. More often it renders the conquest as melodrama between a mostly noble indigenous people slaughtered by a mostly toxic European Christian culture, acting true to its imperialistic and colonialist traditions and values.

In other words, there is little attention given to Aztec imperialism, colonialism, slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, but rather a great deal of emphasis on Aztec sophisticated time-reckoning, monumental building skills, and social stratification. To explain the miraculous defeat of the huge Mexican empire by a few rag-tag, greedy conquistadors, discussion would not entail the innate savagery of the Aztecs that drove neighboring indigenous tribes to ally themselves with Cortés. 

(VICTOR DAVIS HANSON)

The following conglomeration of responses to two separate persons in a LONGER VIDEO where some Native-Americans express their “dislike” of Christopher Columbus.

Subjects dealt with are:

  • Christopher Columbus being the “first terrorist” on the America’s;
  • That land possession was something brought by Westerners;
  • or that Columbus “came to America” at all!

  • Michael Harner, in his 1977 article The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice, estimates the number of persons sacrificed in central Mexico in the 15th century as high as 250,000 per year. Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxochitl, a Mexica descendant and the author of Codex Ixtlilxochitl, estimated that one in five children of the Mexica subjects was killed annually. Victor Davis Hanson argues that a claim by Don Carlos Zumárraga of 20,000 per annum is “more plausible.”…. (Hanson, who accepts the 80,000+ estimate, also notes that it exceeded “the daily murder record at either Auschwitz or Dachau.”) (WIKI)

So the above video show that Christopher Columbus, the Spaniards, nor even Hitler reached the amount of terrorism on people quite like the pre-Colombian indigenous people of the Americas. Here is a small portion from a paper I wrote detailing some of this, followed by an excerpt from a site detailing some of this:

Literature from the Mesoamerica is so very rich and full of the traditions of the people there that it is a welcome challenge to add this flavoring into the classroom. From a historical view Latin literature can be very effective in showing how a culture is influenced over time by another. The Spanish influence on Mesoamerica is still to this day incredibly prevalent; much like the English fingerprint is on North America. The terms should almost be B.S., before Spain, and A.S., after Spain. Norton makes the point in fact that “[m]any of the folktales from Mexico, South and Central America, and southwestern part of the United States reflect a blending of cultures” (Norton et al, 2001, p. 146).

Who could not write of the clash of civilizations represented in the men of Cortez and Montezuma? Unfortunately much of this historical fiction is more fictionalized than history. An exemplary text used to illustrate this in the classroom would be Montezuma’s Daughter by Rider Haggard (1980), originally written in 1894. The myth had already started that the Spaniards were merely there for gold, and killed for it exclusively. While there is a place for literature to express cultural mores and values, even going so far as comforting people away from their homeland, it should still apply to history somewhat. Norton mentions that the “choices of materials to be read and discussed may reflect… moral messages” (Norton, p. 3). Some in the teaching profession can use Latino literature to paint history with broad strokes, thus passing moral messages on to the classroom, guiding, influencing them.

Rarely does one hear in the social studies class, literature class, or history class that Cortez’s small band of men (even with horses) couldn’t have defeated Montezuma’s large army, unless that is, there were defectors. Why would people want to defect from the Aztec culture and join with foreigners? Montezuma had this peculiar habit of taking areas over, grabbing the young men from said area, bringing them back to a temple and while still alive cut their hearts out and throw their bodies down the altar steps (rotten.com, used 4-14-06). This caused many to join the forces of Cortez, making him a more formidable force resulting in forcefully bringing to a halt Aztec pagan sacrifice and setting up Christian icons instead. Incan and Mayan cultures sacrificed humans as well, sometimes 200 children at once.

A lot of this history is bypassed with much of the Mesoamerica literature in the search for national pride and identity. Pride and prejudice is a great conversation to have unfolded by Latino literature, or any of the multicultural writings. Tribal conflicts, territorial rights, or wanting to become a “doctor instead of a bullfighter” are all topics that Western children can relate to, learn essential values from, or see history from a different perspective….

(For references, see my paper, “LATINO LITERATURE“)

The first time I ran into information noting the incredibly evil culture, and how it was ultimately defeated (showing, absolute greed can still have VERY positive aspects to it), was a post on ROTTEN.COM

The funny thing about Montezuma isn’t really that he was a deranged,despotic, cannabilistic, pedophiliac practitioner of human sacrifice with legendary diarrhea.

Well, OK, that is pretty funny. But the really funny thing is how many towns, high schools and rotary clubs are named after the guy. There’s Montezuma, Iowa; Montezuma, Georgia; Montezuma, Kansas; Montezuma, New York; Montezuma Castle National Park in Arizona; Montezuma, Costa Rica; Montezuma, New Mexico… The list goes on and on and on.

What were these people thinking? Do they want you to think their town is full of cannibals? Are they proud of their explosive diarrhea? What was the runner-up name for the town? Hitler, New Mexico? Torquemada? Georgia? De Sade? Kansas?

Montezuma was the emperor of the Aztecs in the 16th century — right about the time that the good times were coming to an end. (Montezuma is the Anglicized version of the Spanish Moctezuma, which is a Spaniardized version of one of those seemingly unpronounceable Aztec names.)

While the coming of the White Man provides a convenient scapegoat for Aztec apologists, the fact is that Montezuma was not a barrel of laughs even before Cortez dropped the Conquistadors in his lap.

Montezuma was a conquering king, who frequently waged war against his neighbors in a pretty successful effort to expand his empire. He kept the gods on his side with a regular regimen of human sacrifice. While the Aztecs had a long history of ritualistic human sacrifice, the art had never known a patron like Montezuma.

At the time, such sacrifices were performed with ritual daggers atop the Aztec pyramids. According to some accounts, Montezuma sacrificed tens of thousands of prisoners at a time, which is a good trick considering each one had to be individually killed.

A 1590 account detailed the procedure: “The usual method of sacrifice was to open the victim’s chest, pull out his heart while he was still alive, and then knock the man down, rolling him down the temple steps, which were awash with blood.” It wasn’t the most efficient procedure. Who knows what Montezuma could have accomplished with a gas chamber, a guillotine, or a submachine gun?

Apparently the gods were appreciative of all this bloodshed, because Montezuma apparently had a pretty good run, annexing several nearby kingdoms and allegedly running a virtual police state with an iron fist….

…let’s move to Columbus and the charge of genocide. The historical Columbus was a Christian explorer. Howard Zinn makes it sound like Columbus came looking for nothing but gold, but Columbus was equally driven by a spirit of exploration and adventure. When we read Columbus’s diaries we see that his motives were complex: he wanted to get rich by discovering new trade routes, but he also wanted to find the Garden of Eden, which he believed was an actual undiscovered place. Of course Columbus didn’t come looking for America; he didn’t know that the American continent existed. Since the Muslims controlled the trade routes of the Arabian Sea, he was looking for a new way to the Far East. Specifically he was looking for India, and that’s why he called the native peoples “Indians.” It is easy to laugh at Columbus’s naïveté, except that he wasn’t entirely wrong. Anthropological research has established that the native people of the Americas did originally come from Asia. Most likely they came across the Bering Strait before the continents drifted apart.

We know that, as a consequence of contact with Columbus and the Europeans who came after him, the native population in the Americas plummeted. By some estimates, more than 80 percent of the Indians perished. This is the basis for the charge of genocide. But there was no genocide. Millions of Indians died as a result of diseases they contracted from their exposure to the white man: smallpox, measles, cholera, and typhus. There is one isolated allega­tion of Sir Jeffrey Amherst (whose name graces Amherst College) approving a strategy to vanquish a hostile Indian tribe by giving the Indians smallpox-infected blankets. Even here, however, it’s not clear the scheme was actually carried out. As historian William McNeill documents in Plagues and Peoples, the white man generally transmit­ted his diseases to the Indians without knowing it, and the Indians died in large numbers because they had not developed immunities to those diseases. This is tragedy on a grand scale, but it is not geno­cide, because genocide implies an intention to wipe out a people. McNeill points out that Europeans themselves had contracted lethal diseases, including the pneumonic and the bubonic plagues, from Mongol invaders from the Asian steppes. The Europeans didn’t have immunities, and during the “Black Death” of the fourteenth century one-third of the population of Europe was wiped out. But no one calls these plagues genocide, because they weren’t.

It’s true that Columbus developed strong prejudices about the native peoples he first encountered—he was prejudiced in favor of them. He praised the intelligence, generosity, and lack of guile among the Tainos, contrasting these qualities with Spanish vices. Subsequent explorers such as Pedro Alvares Cabral, Amerigo Ves­pucci (from whom we get the name “America”), and Walter Raleigh registered similar positive impressions. So where did Europeans get the idea that Indians were “savages”? Actually, they got it from their experience with the Indians. While the Indians Columbus met on his first voyage were hospitable and friendly, on subsequent voyages Columbus was horrified to discover that a number of sailors he had left behind had been killed and possibly eaten by the cannibalistic Arawaks.

When Bernal Diaz arrived in Mexico with the swashbuckling army of Hernán Cortes, he and his fellow Spaniards saw things they had never seen before. Indeed they witnessed one of the most gruesome spectacles ever seen, something akin to what American soldiers saw after World War II when they entered the Nazi con­centration camps. As Diaz describes the Aztecs, in an account generally corroborated by modern scholars, “They strike open the wretched Indian’s chest with flint knives and hastily tear out the palpitating heart which, with the blood, they present to the idols in whose name they have performed the sacrifice. Then they cut off the arms, thighs and head, eating the arms and thighs at their ceremonial banquets.” Huge numbers of Indians—typically cap­tives in war—were sacrificed, sometimes hundreds in a single day. Yet in a comic attempt to diminish the cruelty of the Aztecs, How­ard Zinn remarks that their mass murder “did not erase a certain innocence” and he accuses Cortes of nefarious conduct “turning Aztec against Aztec.”

If the Aztecs of Mexico seemed especially bloodthirsty, they were rivaled by the Incas of South America who also erected sacrificial mounds on which they performed elaborate rites of human sacrifice, so that their altars were drenched with blood, bones were strewn everywhere, and priests collapsed from exhaustion from stabbing their victims.

Even while Europeans were startled and appalled at such blood­thirstiness, there was a countercurrent of admiration for what Euro­peans saw as the Indians’ better qualities. Starting with Columbus and continuing through the next few centuries, native Indians were regarded as “noble savages.” They were admired for their dignity stoicism, and bravery. In reality, the native Indians probably had these qualities in the same proportion as human beings elsewhere on the planet. The idealization of them as “noble savages” seems to be a projection of European fantasies about primitive innocence onto the natives. We too—and especially modern progressives-have the same fantasies. Unlike us, however, the Spanish were forced to confront the reality of Aztec and Inca behavior. Today we have an appreciation for the achievements of Aztec and Inca culture, such as its social organization and temple architecture; but we cannot fault the Spanish for being “distracted” by the mass murder they witnessed. Not all the European hostility to the Indians was the result of irrational prejudice.

While the Spanish conquistadores were surprised to see humans sacrificed in droves, they were not shocked to witness slavery, the subjugation of women, or brutal treatment of war captives—these were familiar enough practices from their own culture. Moreover, in conquering the Indians, and establishing alien rule over them, the Spanish were doing to the Indians nothing more than the Indians had done to each other. So from the point of view of the native Indian people, one empire, that of Spain, replaced another, that of the Aztecs. Did life for the native Indian get worse? It’s very hard to say. The ordinary Indian might now have a higher risk of disease, but he certainly had a lower risk of finding himself under the lurid glare of the obsidian knife.

What, then, distinguished the Spanish from the Indians? The Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa offers an arresting answer. The conquistadores who came to the Americas, he concedes, were “semi-literate, implacable and greedy.” They were clearly believers in the conquest ethic—land is yours if you can take it. Yet these semi-literate greedy swordsmen, without knowing it, also brought with them something new to the Americas. They brought with them the ideas of Western civilization, from Athenian rationalism to Judeo-Christian ideas of human brotherhood to more modern conceptions of self-government, human rights, and property rights. Some of these ideas were nascent and newly developing even in the West. Nevertheless, they were there, and without intending to do so, the conquistadors brought them to the Americas.

To appreciate what Vargas Llosa is saying, consider an astonishing series of events that took place in Spain in the early sixteenth century. At the urging of a group of Spanish clergy, the king of Spain called a halt to Spanish expansion in the Americas, pending the resolution of the question of whether American Indians had souls and could be justly enslaved. This seems odd, and even appalling, to us today, but we should not miss its significance. Historian Lewis Hanke writes that never before or since has a powerful emperor “ordered his conquests to cease until it was decided if they were just.” The king’s actions were in response to petitions by a group of Spanish priests, led by Bartolomé de las Casas. Las Casas defended the Indians in a famous debate held at Valladolid in Spain. On the other side was an Aristotelian scholar, Juan Sepulveda, who relied on Aristotle’s concept of the “natural slave” to argue that Indians were inferior and therefore could be subjugated. Las Casas coun­tered that Indians were human beings with the same dignity and spiritual nature as the Spanish. Today Las Casas is portrayed as a heroic eccentric, but his basic position prevailed at Valladolid. It was endorsed by the pope, who declared in his bull Sublimns Deus, “Indians… are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possessions of their property… nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen it shall be null and of no effect.” Papal bulls and even royal edicts were largely ignored thou­sands of miles away—there were no effective mechanisms of enforce­ment. The conquest ethic prevailed. Even so, over time the principles of Valladolid and Sublimus Deus provided the moral foundation for the enfranchisement of Indians. Indians could themselves appeal to Western ideas of equality, dignity, and property rights in order to resist subjugation, enforce treaties, and get some of their land back….

[….]

The white men who settled America didn’t come as foreign invad­ers; they came as settlers. Unlike the Spanish, who ruled Mexico from afar, the English families who arrived in America left everything behind and staked their lives on the new world. In other words, they came as immigrants. We can say, of course, that immigration doesn’t confer any privileges, and just because you come here to settle doesn’t mean you have a right to the land that is here, but then that logic would also apply to the Indians.

DINESH D’SOUZA, America: Imagine a World Without Her (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2014), 93-97, 98.

On June 23, 1865, in what was the last land battle of the war, Confederate Brigadier General and Cherokee Chief, Stand Watie, finally surrendered his predominantly Cherokee, Oklahoma Indian force to the Union. He was the last Confederate General “standing.”

  • …That same month, Watie’s command surprised a group of soldiers that included troops from the 79th U.S. Colored Infantry who were cutting hay for livestock at the fort. Instead of accepting the surrender of the African Americans, the Confederates killed 40 of them. Such exploits earned Watie promotion to brigadier general… (HISTORY BUFF)

One should see my stuff on the topics as well:

THE FEDERALIST has this excellent article that should be read in full:

…..“Long before the white European knew a North American continent existed, Indians of the Northern Plains were massacring entire villages,” says George Franklin Feldman in the book “Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten.” “And not just killed, but mutilated. Hands and feet were cut off, each body’s head was scalped, the remains were left scattered around the village, which was burned.”

Less Pocahontas and More Blood Sacrifice

When thinking of pre-Columbian America, forget what you’ve seen in the Disney movies. Think “slavery, cannibalism and mass human sacrifice.” From the Aztecs to the Iroquois, that was life among the indigenous peoples before Columbus arrived.

For all the talk from the angry and indigenous about European slavery, it turns out that pre-Columbian America was virtually one huge slave camp. According to “Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865,” by Tony Seybert, “Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.”

“Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running away.”

Things changed when the Europeans arrived, however: “Indians found that British settlers… eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites.”

That’s right: Pocahontas and her pals were slave traders. If you were an Indian lucky enough to be sold to a European slave master, that turned out to be a good thing, relatively speaking. At least you didn’t end up in a scene from “Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom.”

Ritual human sacrifice was widespread in the Americas. The Incas, for example, practiced ritual human sacrifice to appease their gods, either executing captive warriors or “their own specially raised, perfectly formed children,” according to Kim MacQuarrie, author of “The Last Days of the Incas.”

The Aztecs, on the other hand, were more into the “volume, volume, VOLUME” approach to ritual human slaughter. At the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs performed a mass human sacrifice of an estimated 80,000 enslaved captives in four days.

Also Widespread Torture and Cannibalism

According to an eyewitness account of “indigenous peoples” at work—in this case, the Iroquois in 1642, as observed by the Rev. Father Barthelemy Vimont’s “The Jesuit Relations”—captives had their fingers cut off, were forced to set each other on fire, had their skinned stripped off and, in one captured warrior’s case, “the torture continued throughout the night, building to a fervor, finally ending at sunrise by cutting his scalp open, forcing sand into the wound, and dragging his mutilated body around the camp. When they had finished, the Iroquois carved up and ate parts of his body.”

Shocked? Don’t be. Cannibalism was also fairly common in the New World before (and after) Columbus arrived. According to numerous sources, the name “Mohawk” comes from the Algonquin for “flesh eaters.” Anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of “Cannibals and Kings,” reports that the Aztecs viewed their prisoners as “marching meat.”

The native peoples also had an odd obsession with heads. Scalping was a common practice among many tribes, while some like the Jivaro in the Andes were feared for their head-hunting, shrinking their victims’ heads to the size of an orange. Even sports involved severed heads. If you were lucky enough to survive a game of the wildly popular Meso-American ball (losers were often dispatched to paradise), your trophy could include an actual human head.

There Are No Pure Peoples in History

Slavery, torture, and cannibalism—tell me why we’re celebrating “Indigenous People’s Day” again? And we’re getting rid of Columbus Day to protest—what? The fact that one group of slavery-practicing violent people conquered another group of violent, blood-thirsty slavers? That’s a precis of the history of the Americas before Columbus arrived.

This has always been the fatal flaw of the Left’s politics of race guilt: Name the race that’s not “guilty”? Racism, violence, and conquest are part of the human condition, not the European one….

Goodbye Columbus?

AMERICAN GREATNESS has this article I excerpt from:

…. As Mary Grabar has pointed out in her scathing critique of Zinn, his chapter on Columbus was plagiarized from Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth, a book for high schoolers, first published in 1976 by Hans Koning. As she and others, including Robert Royal and Armando Simon, observe, contemporary accounts contradict the portrait of Columbus painted by the likes of Koning and Zinn. He, like most men, was imperfect but far from the moral monster described by these modern leftist writers.

As noted above, the attack on Columbus mirrors the broader assault on the United States, which portrays America as irredeemably racist and the indigenous peoples of the Americas as innocent victims of Western crimes, in particular, genocide. Indoctrinated by the likes of Zinn, the pushers of “1619 Project,” and their ilk, many young people believe that slavery was invented by the United States. Of course, when the United States declared its independence in 1776, slavery was a world-wide phenomenon. African states, such as the Kingdom of Dahomey and the Ashanti Empire of Western Africa were slaveholders themselves and sold other Africans into the Atlantic slave trade. Although the Declaration of Independence did not end slavery at once, it made the abolition of slavery a moral and political imperative.

The flip side of the denigration of Columbus and the United States is the claim that the native peoples of America were peaceful and innocent victims of white greed and violence. The fact is that the Indians did the same things to other Indians the white man is accused of having done to the Indians.

They fought over land and hunting grounds. They fought over trade with the British and the French. The Iroquois, who allied themselves with the British during the colonial period, fought a war of extermination against the Huron, who allied themselves with the French. For accounts of the interactions of the Europeans, Americans, and the various Indian tribes, read Francis Parkman and James Axtell.

Atrocities by one tribe against another were a matter of course. Many of the tribes practiced ritual torture. An observer provided an account of Iroquois warriors burning Huron captives. As the flames consumed them, the Huron sang a song. “It was a very sad song,” the observer noted.

We rightly condemn the forcible removal of the Cherokee from the American Southeast. But the Cherokee were in the Southeast because they had been driven there earlier by the Sioux. The Black Hills became “sacred” to the Lakota only after they had driven earlier tribes away.

As two fine books, Comanche Empire and Empire of the Summer Moon, illustrate, the Comanche were major geopolitical players in North America, helping to shape the policies of first Spain, then Mexico and the United States. Indeed, the main reason that Spain and Mexico invited Anglo settlers into Texas was to provide a buffer against Comanche raids into Mexico.

To point out the behavior of the Indians is not to excuse any crimes and atrocities committed against them by whites but to place those actions in historical context….

THE BIGGIE!

Did the United States Practice Genocide

Against Native-Americans?

(Originally Posted March of 2015 — Updated Today – July 5th, 2021)

ALSO SEE:

SOME PREVIOUS POSTS ON THE NATIVE-AMERICAN MANTRAS:

    1. (Editor’s note: A recent federal bill memorializing as a National Historic Trail what has come to be known as the Cherokee Indian Trail of Tears is based on false history, argues William R. Higginbotham. In this article, the Texas-based writer delves into the historic record and concludes that about 840 Indians not the 4,000 figure commonly accepted died in the 1837-38 trek west; that the government-financed march was conducted by the Indians themselves; and that the phrase “Trail of Tears” was a label that was added 70 years later under questionable circumstances.) The problem with some of our accounts of history is that they have been manipulated to fit conclusions not borne out by facts. Nothing could be more intellectually dishonest. This is about a vivid case in point.

As you read this, keep in mind this is not a polemic saying these United States were in the right in all their dealings with the American Indian. What I am saying is that when looking at history, one needs to do so in full, and not in part.

The book mentioned in the above video is PLAGUES AND PEOPLES, by William H. McNeill. Here is the video description of the above:

  • Here is a quick blurb by Dinesh D’Souza discussing the genocide claim against the American Indian by Settlers. Much like the Black Plague killing an “up-to” estimated 60% of the European population, so to a LARGE percentage (some say 90%) died of contact with traders whom the Native-Populations had no immunities to. Just like when Western traders came into contact with the Asian continent. We don’t say this was an Asian genocide perpetrated on Westerners. Just like we do not say this (well, rational people) of Native-American contact with the West.

“Kill every buffalo you can,” he said; “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” ~ Colonel Richard Irving Dodge (1827 – June 16, 1895), United States Army.

I came across the above quote that got me thinking — due to the source… a left leaning website — that the quote was connected to a more complicated history than just simply “genocide” against Native-Americans (N-A from now on). Which the website was implying the quote meant. (BTW, if you are like my wife and can do without all my pomp-and-circumstance and want the bottom line ~ read this quote.) The original hat-tip came from a conservative website Gateway Pundit, referencing a call for Buffalo [New York] to change it’s racist name. (I know, EVERYTHING is racist nowadays.)

One of the graphics Gateway used in his story was this one, note the quote by Col. Dodge:

As I continued my search… this quote from Col. Dodge showed up quite a bit. So I did a Google book search, found some promising books that would lead to the origins of the quote. I subsequently ordered used versions (pictured below).

The American West book led me ultimately to two online resources: one a book from 1911 (the original source of the quote by Col. Dodge used in many resources), Sir William Butler: An Autobiography (London, England: Constable And Company Ltd., 1911); the other resource was an article in the official Journal of the Western History Association entitled, “The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865-1883“

In these four resources as well as previous posts, I will unravel a fuller picture of the history/ethos behind such a statement. FIRST, however, here is the fuller quote as remembered by Gen. Butler:

At North Platte we found a distinguished officer of the army in command, Colonel Dodge, one of the foremost frontier men of his time, and the descendant of officers who had prepared the road for the army of settlement in the West. He was a mighty hunter too, and had killed every variety of big game from the Rocky Mountains to the Missouri. We told him of the week’s hunting we had had on the Platte prairies. More than thirty buffalo bulls had been shot by us, and I could not but feel some qualms of conscience at the thought of the destruction of so much animal life ; but Colonel Dodge held different views. “Kill every buffalo you can,” he said; “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” It sounded hard then, and it seems hard now ; but seven years after this time I crossed by railway from California to New York, and looking out at this same Platte valley I saw it a-smilin’ plain of farms, waving crops, and neat homesteads. The hungry crowd from overcharged Europe had surged into settlement over the old buffalo pastures of the Platte. ‘ Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ It was right. These Crows, Cheyennes, Sioux, and Blackfeet Indians were no doubt splendid hunters, and fierce raiders, and crafty foemen, but no man could say they were meek.

[Lieut. General The Rt. Hon, G.G.B.] Sir W. F. Butler, Sir William Butler: An Autobiography (London, England: Constable And Company Ltd., 1911), 97.

When I read this fuller quote something stood out: “splendid hunters,” “fierce raiders,” “crafty foemen” [an enemy in war], and “‘not’ meek.” This brought to mind a previous discussion with a person on Facebook about the same issue. Daniel made a similar point that was one-sided… as if the American Indians were angels. I made the following historical point:

One of the most brutal raids of the American Revolution, a Loyalist-Iroquois coalition massacred more than 200 unsuspecting Patriot militiamen. Having raided and scorched dozens of frontier towns in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, the British arrived in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, on July 3rd. The Patriots, inexperienced and outnumbered, were ambushed and subsequently routed following a forty-five minute close combat battle. As the Patriot line crumbled, the Iroquois began brutally hunting down survivors. Only sixty Americans survived to see another day, and only five were taken prisoner. Fleeing soldiers who had surrendered, were tortured to death by Loyalists and Iroquois. It was reported that 227 Patriot scalps were collected. Dozens of bodies were found on the line of retreat, which were all buried in a common grave. In retaliation, the Sullivan Expedition, commissioned by General George Washington, systematically destroyed at least forty Iroquois villages throughout upstate New York, in 1779. Another gruesome massacre would take place against the Continental Army at Cherry Valley. 

This is an important distinction coming up, and is worthy to note. There were massacres from both sides… this is the most basic understanding of this period (“boiling” it down). Now, reports of the massacres of prisoners at Wyoming and atrocities at Cherry Valley enraged the American public.

Did you catch that Daniel? Were the Iroquois ever “enraged” over it’s own actions? Were the French? Understanding history and the ethical foundations of the people involved is key to grasping these very complicated things well.

(Battle of Wyoming 1778)

Another point I pushed with Daniel in this discussion was that after the War of Independence, the Revolutionary War that is, the relationship between the people in this fledgling nation and the American Indian changed dramatically. You see, the Big Five (Five Nation League), the biggest Indian nations, ALL sided with the British.

CHEROKEES and CREEKS (among other TRIBES) in the southern interior and most IROQUOIS nations in the northern interior provided crucial support to the British war effort. With remarkably few exceptions, N-A support for the British was close to universal.

[….]

The MOHAWK chief THAYENDANEGEA (known to Anglo-Americans as JOSEPH BRANT) was the most important Iroquois leader in the Revolutionary Era. He convinced four of the six Iroquois nations to join him in an alliance with the British and was instrumental in leading combined Indian, British, and Loyalist forces on punishing raids in western New York and Pennsylvania in 1778 and 1779. These were countered by a devastating Patriot campaign into Iroquois country that was explicitly directed by General Washington to both engage warriors in battle and to destroy all Indian towns and crops so as to limit the military threat posed by the Indian-British alliance.

When British General John Burgoyne marched from Canada to Albany,

some of the Native American warriors he enlisted began killing settlers.

When the news of Jane McCrea’s murder reached major cities,

many young Americans enlisted to fight.

In spite of significant Native American aid to the British, the European treaty negotiations that concluded the war in 1783 had no native representatives. Although Ohio and Iroquois Indians had not surrendered nor suffered a final military defeat, the United States claimed that its victory over the British meant a victory over Indians as well. Not surprisingly, due to their lack of representation during treaty negotiations, Native Americans received very poor treatment in the diplomatic arrangements. The British retained their North American holdings north and west of the Great Lakes, but granted the new American republic all land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. In fact, this region was largely unsettled by whites and mostly inhabited by Native Americans. As a Wea Indian complained about the failed military alliance with the British, “In endeavoring to assist you it seems we have wrought our own ruin.” Even groups like the ONEIDA, one of the Iroquois nations that allied with the Americans, were forced to give up TRADITIONAL LANDS with other native groups.

(Revolutionary Limits: Native Americans)

This was an interesting dynamic when we beat the British and the Big Five. While the British warriors were sent-a-packin’, the American Indian combatants stayed. This was a tough situation, to say the least. History is tough.

Continuing.

Similarly, the near extinction of the Buffalo had many reasons and participants from both sides. In Settler and the N-A side participated in their demise. These American Indians were NOT angels. When trading routes and goods started to be established, we find that greed and power are a universal trait in all people of the world. The Beaver Wars exemplified just how non-angelic these American Indians were:

When the Mohawks attacked Metacomet instead of supporting him, they were motivated by self-interest. Casting themselves in the role of powerful intermediaries between neighboring Indians and the English colonies, the Mohawks and the other tribes of the Five Nation League of the Iroquois sought to place themselves in a dom­inant position.

European trade goods first began to reach the peoples of the Five Nations through indirect means as early as the mid-fifteenth century. In many Iroquois graves dating to that period archaeologists find brass, iron, and glass items. Their first direct ac­cess to these valuable goods came when Dutch traders established posts along the Hudson River in the 1610s. But the Iroquois had a problem. The best source of beaver pelts came from colder climes to the north. To supply themselves with the means to trade, the Mohawks, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Senecas thus began to raid their northern neighbors, plundering their stores of furs and bringing the pelts south to trade with the Dutch. These raids began a long series of seventeenth-century con­flicts known as the Beaver Wars in which warriors of the Five Nations attacked other Indian peoples as far west as the Illinois country, making themselves into the most powerful Indian confederacy on the North American continent.

But the Beaver Wars were spurred by another factor besides economics. Imported European diseases had hit the Iroquois hard. By the 1640s the population of the Five Nations had been cut nearly in half. Warfare against their neighbors not only gave the Iroquois access to the great fur grounds of the northern Great Lakes but offered the opportunity to take captives.

The Iroquois directed their most furious attacks against the Hurons, allies of the French. [The Hurons were one of the more peaceful tribes] … unlike “So far as I can divine,” one Jesuit missionary wrote, “it is the design of the Iroquois to capture all the Hurons, if it is possible; to put the chiefs and great part of the nation to death, and with the rest to form one nation and one country.” In 1647 and 1648 the Mohawks and Senecas massed a brutal attack against the Hurons, de­stroying both Indian towns and Jesuit missionary stations. The Iroquois suffered enormous losses, but they inflicted even greater ones on the Hurons, and they so de­moralized their enemies that those who were not killed or captured dispersed and fled westward. Hundreds of Hurons were marched south to the Seneca and Mohawk towns and were adopted into the villages.

Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faracher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, CT, 2000), 67-69.

And in a very recent article (July 4th, 2021), the POST MILLENNIAL counters a bit NPR’s attack on history in this regard:

…The Ojibway were a loose confederation of states which, at their peak, had a massive extension throughout North America. They roughly paralleled the Celts in ancient times, preferring to merge peacefully with neighboring civilizations.

Most historians would agree indeed that they were very different from the Iroquois, who at the time were allied with the British Crown, and were very warlike and absolutely feared for their prowess on the battlefield by Europeans and other Indigenous cultures alike.

Choctaws, Chicasaws, Cherokee, Creeks, Mohawks, Iroquois, and Seminoles to name just a few that were in states of war with each-other in some fashion before-and-after the white-man every step foot on the continent.

Here for instance are the killing, scalping, putting into slavery those captured ~ FIGHT over the Black Hills (via: America: Imagine the World Without Her)

Now, however, as the Beaver Wars exemplified… there was a larger “monetary” benefit to these raids, land grabs, and the like.

To wit, *JUST LIKE* with the buffalo.

Here is what I mean.

While there was a concerted effort to get American Indians to become less nomadic (and thus less liable to be: “fierce raiders,” “crafty foemen” [an enemy in war], and “‘not’ meek”), the Indians THEMSELVES played a large roll in this “de-nomaditisation”! American Indians THEMSELVES sought to make a buck off of these new techniques of leather making (see especially the second large quote below):

Until 1871 the fur buffalo robe was the main marketable item, the leather being a far more limited commodity. Leather was used by the British Army in the Crimean War (1854-1856), but only after 1871 did an English firm provide a mass market for the buffalo hides. Previously, when the robes were the main item of value, commercial hunting was confined mainly to the winter when the fur was thick, but with leather as the mass product, the buffalo hunter could kill with profit all year round (Vestal, 1952, 40). The railroads, too, were glad to have the busi­ness. Their progress westward had been stopped by the long depression of the 1870s; with almost no traffic, carrying buffalo meat, hides, and bones to eastern markets was a valued business opportunity. Merchants and freighters welcomed the business that came from buffalo hunting (Vestal, 1952, 38).

Hardly had the market for buffalo hides become widely known than the panic of 1873 began which lasted for five years. During those years most of the buffalo on the southern plains were destroyed [Vestal, 1952, 451]. In 1871 the buffalo were estimated in the millions. Many of the hunters entered the profession expecting it to prove a life work and despaired of killing off more than the annual increase of the herd. Hunters encamped by water holes and rivers where the animals came to drink, built watch fires at night so that the slaughter could go on for twenty-four hours a day [Vestal, 1952, 46].

For maximum efficiency some hunters used the Big Fifty, a gun pro­duced by Sharps to the hunter’s specifications, made to load and fire eight times a minute (Sandoz, 1954, 97; Vestal, 1952, 41). “In a brief two years (1873-1875), where there had been myriads of buffalo, there were only myriads of rotting carcasses. The air was filled with the sicken­ing stench of death. . . .” [Vestal, 1952, 46].

The meat rotted, the bones remained, and then they, too, became a source of commercial profit. They were used in making fertilizer or in making bone china. They brought good prices. A man driving to town to trade would fill his wagon bed with bones and sell them on Front Street, Dodge City (Kansas). There were bones piled up as high as a man’s head, extending all along the track for many yards awaiting shipment. Many of the settlers managed to keep going by selling bones when drought and depression again struck the plains and destroyed their corn crop (Vestal, 1952, 50), before wheat had become a major crop of the area. One bone-buying firm estimated that over seven years (1884-1891) they bought the bones of approximately 5,950,000 buffalo skeletons. This firm was only one of many (Sandoz, 1954, 358).

Eleanor Burke Leacock and Nancy Oestreich Lurie, North American Indians In Historical Perspective (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1971), 219-220.

Supply-and-demand. This doesn’t make the near extinction an ideal goal… but it opened up the Plains for a large movement of settlers. AS WELL AS pointing out that the real push for Buffalo hides was profit during a slow times after the Civil War; not “genocide. Nor was the goal “death” of N-A’s, directly. Indirectly, anything subsidized writ-large is known to cause death in greater numbers.[icon name=”arrow-circle-o-down” class=””] In similar fashion, authors Hine and Faracher make the same historical statement:

Plains Indians had long hunted the buffalo, and the level of their hunting greatly increased with the development of the equestrian Indian tradition in the eighteenth century. From a peak of perhaps thirty million, the number of buffalo had declined to perhaps ten million by the mid-nineteenth century, partly as a result of commercial over-hunting by Indians, but also because of environmental competition from growing herds of wild horses and the spread of bovine diseases introduced by cattle crossing with settlers on the Overland Trail. By overgrazing, cutting timber, and fouling water sources, overland migrants also contributed significantly to the degeneration of habitats crucial for the health and survival of the buffalo. The confluence of these factors created a crisis for buffalo-hunting Indians by the 1860s. Tribal spokesmen protested the practice of hunters who killed for robes, leaving the meat to rot on the plains. “Has the white man become a child,” the Comanche chief Santana complained to an army officer in 1867, “that he should recklessly kill and not eat?” But it was less a case of childish whim than cynical guile. “Kill every buffalo you can!” Colonel Richard Dodge urged a sport hunter in 1867. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

The extension of railroad lines onto the Great Plains and the development in 1870 of a technique for converting buffalo hide into commercial leather sealed the buf­falo’s fate. Lured by the profits to be made in hides, swarms of hunters invaded western Kansas. Using a high-powered rifle, a skilled hunter could kill dozens of animals in an afternoon. And unlike the hunter of buffalo robes, who was limited to taking his catch in the winter when the coat was thick, hide hunting was a year-round business. General Philip Sheridan applauded their work. “They are destroying the Indians’ commissary,” he declared. “Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are ex terminated.” As the buffalo hunters did their work, Indians also accelerated their kills, attempting to capture their share of the market. At the Santa Fe depot in Dodge City mountainous stacks of buffalo hides awaited shipment to eastern tanneries. Historians estimate that in the five years between 1870 and 1875 five or six million buffalo died on the southern plains, wiping out the southern herds. The war on the animals then shifted to the northern plains, following the advancing tracks of the Northern Pacific. “If I could learn that every Buffalo in the northern herd were killed I would be glad,” Sheridan declared in 1881. “Since the destruction of the southern herd . . . the Indians in that section have given us no trouble.” His hopes were soon fulfilled. “It was in the summer of my twentieth year (1883),” the Sioux holy man Black Elk later testified, that “the last of the bison herds was slaughtered by the Wa-sichus,” the Lakota term for white men. With the exception of a small wild herd in northern Alberta and a few remnant individuals preserved by sentimental ranch-men like Charlie Goodnight, the North American buffalo had been destroyed. “The Wasichus did not kill them to eat,” said Black Elk incredulously. “They killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. . . . And when there was nothing left but heaps of bones, the Wasichus came and gathered up even the bones and sold them.” This shameful campaign of extinction remains un­matched in the American annals of nature’s conquest.

Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faracher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, CT, 2000), 317-318.

One needs to also keep in historical perspective that yes, these buffalo killed were done so primarily for their skin. And a lot of waste was involved. But even the Plains Indians are no angels in “waste.”

For instance, I wrote a response to an in-class assignment to my sons elementary class lesson about HOW the Settlers treated the New World versus how the Indians treated it. Here is a quote from that post:

From James Fenimore Cooper to Dances with Wolves and Disney’s Pocahontas, American Indians have been mythologized as noble beings with a “spiritual, sacred attitude towards land and animals, not a practical utilitarian one.”[16] Small children are taught that the Plains Indians never wasted any part of the buffalo. They grow up certain that the Indians lived as one with nature, and that white European settlers were the rapists who destroyed it.

In The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown University, strips away the myth to show that American Indians behaved pretty much like everyone else. When times were bad they used the whole buffalo. When times were good, “whole herds” of buffalo might be killed only for their tongues or their fetuses.[17] Although American Indians adapted to their environment and were intimately familiar with it, they had no qualms about shaping it to their needs.

Indians set fires to promote the growth of grasses and make land more productive for the game and plants that they preferred. Sometimes fire was used carefully. Sometimes it was not. Along with the evidence that Indians used fire to improve habitat are abundant descriptions of carelessly started fires that destroyed all plant life and entire buffalo herds.[18]

Nor were American Indians particularly interested in conserving resources for the future. In the East, they practiced slash and burn agriculture. When soils became infertile, wood for fuel was exhausted, and game depleted, whole villages moved.[19] The Cherokee, along with the other Indians who participated in the Southern deerskin trade, helped decimate white-tailed deer populations.[20] Cherokee mythology believed that deer that were killed in a hunt were reanimated.

In all, contemporary accounts suggest that many Indians treated game as an inexhaustible resource. Despite vague hints in the historical records that some Crees may have tried to conserve beaver populations by allocating hunting territories and sparing young animals, Krech concludes that it was “market forces in combination with the Hudchild’s Bay Company policies [which actively promoted conservation]” that “led to the eventual recovery of beaver populations.”[21]

Those who blame European settlers for genocide because they introduced microbes that ravaged native populations might as well call the Mongols genocidal for creating the plague reservoirs that led to the Black Death in Europe.[22] Microbes travel with their hosts. Trade, desired by Indians as well as whites, created the pathways for disease.

[16] Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, W.W. Norton & Company; New York: NY (1999), p. 22.

[17] Ibid., p. 135.

[18] Ibid., p. 119.

[19] Ibid., p. 76.

[20] Ibid., p. 171.

[21] Ibid., p. 188.

[22] For a discussion of the effect of the Mongol invasions and their effect on European epidemiology see, William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Doubleday; New York, NY (1977)

You see… when history is looked at in total and not in isolation, a theme comes out. Man is fallen. All men. Indians, Aborigines, Africans, Native-Americans, etc, etc. For history to be twisted, it needs to be viewed in isolation from other parts. History is not pretty, and the good things that come from it should be lauded… because they are rare. And this is not a polemic saying these United States were in the right in all their dealings with N-As. Reading through pages 176-184 in The American West book is heartbreaking. Moving whole groups of people by force has awful consequences, period. In this graphic from page 179 of the aforementioned book shows the undertaking started in this respect ~ even keeping in mind most fought against us in the Revolution. It doesn’t mean innocent men, women, and children were affected:

Alternatively, it is tough to argue that genocide or racism was involved as well. For instance, Colonel Dodge could be said to hate the Buffalo more than Indians. An insightful quote is this one, and, can be argued to be “speciesism” more strongly if Indian genocide is argued from his earlier solitary quote, via the official Journal of the Western History Association:

Lieutenant Colonel Dodge, who fancied himself a bona fide sportsman, regarded buffalo as “the most unwieldy, sluggish, and stupid of all plains animals.” To the hunter on foot, buffalo were by no means difficult to kill in large numbers. “If not alarmed at sight or smell of a foe,” wrote Dodge, “he will stand stupidly gazing at his companions in their death throes until the whole herd is shot down.” To be sure, Dodge regarded buffalo hunting on horseback as exciting and dangerous. But though chasing buffalo was thrilling to the novice, Dodge thought that “frequent repetition is like eating quail on toast every day for a month–monotonous.”

The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865-1883 Author(s): David D. Smits Source: The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 325-326; Published by: Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University on behalf of the The Western History Association.

As Christians we look at all history as providential, run by a “higher hand.” In doing research for this subject something stood out to me.

And it is the idea that God works to make Good out of horrible.

Referring back to the quote above with the Iroquois would battle other tribes for dominance and control, those they didn’t kill and scalp, they would “adopt. Makes slaves, but these slaves would become part of their new found tribe. I will pick up where I left off in that quote:

Hundreds of Hurons were marched south to the Seneca and Mohawk towns and were adopted into the villages. Many of these Hurons were Christians, and they were the first to introduce Eu­ropean religion among the Five Nations. So dependent were the Iroquois on keep­ing their adoptees happy that eventually they were forced to invite Jesuits into their homeland to minister to these Christian Hurons, thus giving the missionaries an op­portunity to work among the Five Nations. Experiencing the same disruption and cultural trauma that had made the Hurons vulnerable to the Jesuit appeal, many Iro­quois converted to Catholicism. Rates of conversion were especially high among the Mohawks—the people most directly affected by their contact with European traders on the Hudson River. By the 1660s there were strong factions of pro-French Chris­tians in all the Iroquois towns of the Five Nations.

WOW! God is good. I also wish to note an early “Republican” American Indian I came across in that 1911 autobiography of In General Butler where he recalls one Native American being pressured by the Canadian government to go live on a reserve as saying this… and note, this Indian sounds like a Tea Partier!

“Why should I go into one place?” he used to ask the Hudson Bay officer and Mr. Dickens. “Do I not see all the Indians who go into one place die off faster than ever they died by the guns and knives of the Blackfeet! Are they not all starving?” They would tell him then that he was old, and that that was the reason why the Canadian Government wished him to be easy and comfortable on a reserve. To which Big Bear would reply, “It is true that I am old, but I have fed myself for seventy years. I can still hunt and feed myself, and I will stay in the open country till I die; then, when I am dead, you can put me into some one place if you like.” 

[Lieut. General The Rt. Hon, G.G.B.] Sir W. F. Butler, Sir William Butler: An Autobiography (London, England: Constable And Company Ltd., 1911), 258. [back]

He understood what many years later C.S. Lewis and then The Gipper stated:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” ~ C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 292.


Also, it must be kept in mind that Republicans rejected the bills and legislation leading to the Trail of Tears. The Democrats were the one’s who put forward legislation to remove by force Native Americans from their land and move them to Federal land for subsistence off the State. Here is a smaller excerpt for a great chapter via D’Souza:

…Back to our story. Eventually the Jackson Democrats found a small faction of Cherokee who were willing, in exchange for bribes, to sign a removal agreement. This was called the Treaty of New Echota. The leaders of this group were the true Uncle Toms. They were not the recognized leaders of the Cherokee, and more than fifteen thousand Cherokee—led by Ross—signed a petition of protest. Ignoring their pleas, the U.S. government gave the Cherokee two years to migrate voluntarily.

The deadline of 1838 came and went, and most Cherokee had not moved. The Democrats at this point did not hesitate to use force. Those who refused to move were compelled. “The soldiers cleared out one farm at a time, one valley at a time,” Inskeep writes. “Approaching a house, the troops would surround it so that no one would escape, then order out the occupants with no more than they could carry.”

Native Indians unable to travel were rounded up in internment camps, a policy reminiscent of the Japanese internments that a later Democratic administration would enforce during World War II. Reports differ about how bad conditions in the camps were; what no one disputes is that around four thousand Indians died from malnourishment and disease. The Trail of Tears has gone down in American history as cruel and infamous. It certainly was, although its actual perpetrator was not “America” but rather the Jackson Democrats.

The Trail of Tears occurred after Jackson had left the presidency. He was by this time back at his plantation, the Hermitage. His handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, was president. Yet Van Buren was only continuing the policies of his mentor. From a safe distance, Jackson approvingly watched his Democratic Party carry out his handiwork.

For Jackson, the Trail of Tears represented the culmination of his lifelong efforts. Far from being a disaster, this ugly chapter in U.S. history was one of the original “achievements” of the newly formed Democratic Party. Moreover, the way the Jackson Democrats treated the Indians was not an aberration. Rather, it was only the beginning of a long subsequent Democratic Party history of dispossession, cruelty, bigotry, and theft.

Dinesh D’Souza, Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2016), 63-64.